The Book on Apache Polaris
Published by Self-published · Tech
Building the open data lakehouse with the industry standard Iceberg REST catalog.
Who this book is for
Data engineers, data architects, platform engineers, and technical leaders who design, build, or scale open data lakehouses and want to avoid catalog lock-in and understand the Iceberg REST specification.
Table of contents
- What Is a Data Lakehouse
- What Is Apache Iceberg
- The Lakehouse Catalog and the REST Catalog Specification
- What Is Apache Polaris
- Quickstart: Your First Polaris Catalog
- Installing Dependencies
- Deploying Polaris
- Creating a Catalog
- Using Polaris
- Realms, Entities, and Policy
- Generic Tables and Telemetry
- The Command Line Interface and Admin Tool
- Configuring Polaris
- Managing Security and Access Control
- Deploying with Helm Charts
- Metastores: Persistence Backends
- Federation: Unifying Multiple Catalogs
- The Polaris API, Spark Client, and Evolution
- Dremio Open Catalog: Managed Polaris
- Polaris with PyIceberg
- Polaris for Agentic Analytics
- Data Mesh and Federated Governance
- The Future of Apache Polaris
Excerpt
A company with forty terabytes of sales records, customer interactions, and supply chain events faces a decision that will shape its data strategy for the next decade. The data lives in object storage already, sitting in hundreds of thousands of files across S3 buckets and Azure containers. Analysts want to run SQL queries against it. Data scientists want to train models on it. The finance team wants a dashboard that updates every morning by 7 a.m. The question is not whether to store the data. The question is how to make it useful.
