Why Data Analysts, Engineers, Architects and Scientists Should Care about Dremio and Apache Iceberg

September 10, 2024

Data architecture is an ever-evolving landscape. Over the years, we’ve witnessed the shift from on-premises data warehouses to on-premises data lakes, then to cloud-based data warehouses and lakes. Now we’re seeing a growing trend toward hybrid infrastructure. One thing is clear: change is inevitable. That’s why it’s crucial to have a flexible architecture, allowing you to embrace future innovations without overhauling your entire data ecosystem.

In this article, I’ll explore why data professionals—whether you’re a data analyst, engineer, architect, or scientist—should care about technologies like Apache Iceberg and Dremio. I’ll explain how these tools can simplify your workflow while maintaining the flexibility you need.

What is Dremio?

Dremio is a Lakehouse Platform designed to help you unlock the full potential of your existing data lake by embracing three key architectural trends: the data lakehouse, data mesh, and data virtualization.

Data Virtualization: Dremio’s SQL query engine, built on Apache Arrow and other performance innovations, enables you to seamlessly federate queries across databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouse catalogs, including Iceberg and Delta Lake tables. With industry-leading performance, Dremio provides a practical and highly effective tool for data virtualization.
Data Mesh: Dremio’s Semantic Layer empowers you to model, collaborate, and govern your data across all sources from a single location. This robust feature allows you to create virtual data marts or data products that adhere to data mesh principles, facilitating better collaboration and governance across teams.
Lakehouse Architecture: Dremio’s Lakehouse capabilities fully support reading and writing to Apache Iceberg tables. With Dremio’s Enterprise Lakehouse Catalog, you can enable Git-like isolation for workloads, create zero-copy environments for experimentation and development, and automate the optimization of your Iceberg tables. This ensures they are both performant and storage-efficient, transforming your data lake into a fully functional data warehouse—essentially, a data lakehouse.

Beyond enabling you to maximize the value and accessibility of your data, Dremio offers flexibility in deployment, whether on-premises or in the cloud. It can also access data from both environments, delivering unmatched flexibility and data unification.

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What is Apache Iceberg?

Apache Iceberg is a table format that brings data warehouse-like functionality to your data lake by utilizing Apache Parquet files. Iceberg acts as a metadata layer around groups of Parquet files, offering three key capabilities:

Consistent Table Definition: Iceberg ensures a consistent definition of what files are part of the table, providing stability and reliability in managing large datasets.
Efficient Data Scanning: It provides statistics on the table that function as an index, enabling efficient and optimized scans of the table for faster query performance.
Advanced Data Warehouse Features: Iceberg supports essential data warehouse features like ACID guarantees and schema evolution, along with unique capabilities like partition evolution and hidden partitioning. These features make partitioning easier to use for both data engineers and data analysts.

By enabling your data lake to function as a data warehouse, Apache Iceberg, when paired with a Lakehouse platform like Dremio, allows you to efficiently manage your Iceberg tables while unifying them with other data sources across databases, data lakes, and data warehouses.

Why Data Engineers Should Care?

Data engineers face various daily challenges when dealing with complex data ecosystems. These challenges often stem from data silos, governance issues, and managing long chains of pipelines. Here are some of the most common pain points:

Data Silos: Different teams or departments often store their data in separate systems, such as databases, cloud storage, or on-prem data lakes. This fragmentation creates data silos, making it difficult to integrate and unify data across the organization. Data engineers spend significant time building and maintaining pipelines to access, transform, and consolidate this data.
Data Governance: Ensuring proper data governance is another ongoing challenge. Data engineers must ensure compliance with data access, security, lineage, and privacy policies across a diverse set of data sources. Without a unified approach, enforcing consistent data governance can be a cumbersome and error-prone process.
Complex Pipelines: Managing long and complex data pipelines often involves many interdependent steps, from data extraction to transformation and loading (ETL). These pipelines are fragile, difficult to maintain, and prone to errors when upstream changes occur, causing bottlenecks in data delivery and forcing engineers to spend time on troubleshooting rather than innovation.

How Apache Iceberg and Dremio Alleviate These Challenges

Apache Iceberg and Dremio provide a powerful combination that addresses these challenges with modern, scalable solutions:

Unifying Data Silos: Dremio’s high-performance data virtualization capabilities enable seamless querying across multiple data sources—whether it’s a data lake, database, or cloud storage—without the need for complex pipelines. This allows data engineers to access and integrate data more efficiently, reducing the friction of working across data silos.
Data Governance Simplified: With Dremio’s Semantic Layer, data engineers can model, secure, and govern data from a single interface, ensuring consistent governance across all sources. Iceberg’s metadata layer also tracks schema changes, partitions, and file statistics, making managing and auditing data lineage and compliance easier.
Streamlining Pipeline Complexity: Dremio’s reflections feature reduces the need for many steps in traditional data pipelines by enabling automatic optimization and caching or views. This eliminates the need for complex ETL processes and materialized views, allowing data engineers to focus on delivering insights faster. Meanwhile, Apache Iceberg allows pipelines to end directly in your data lake, removing the need to move data into a separate data warehouse. This simplifies data architecture and cuts down on unnecessary data movement, while still providing powerful data warehouse-like features directly in the lake.
Improved Performance: Both Dremio and Iceberg are optimized for performance. Dremio’s SQL engine, built on Apache Arrow, allows for fast queries across large datasets, while Iceberg’s advanced indexing and partitioning features reduce the time spent scanning tables, making querying more efficient.

By leveraging Dremio and Apache Iceberg, data engineers can spend less time troubleshooting and managing infrastructure, and more time driving innovation and delivering value to the business.

Why Data Architects Should Care

Streamlining Data Architect Challenges with Dremio and Apache Iceberg

Data Architects are critical in designing and maintaining scalable, efficient, and future-proof data platforms. Their primary challenges often include managing the complexity of data infrastructure, controlling costs, and ensuring that the platform is easy for teams across the organization to adopt. Here’s how Dremio and Apache Iceberg help overcome these challenges:

Reducing Complexity and Maintenance: Designing and maintaining a data platform often involves integrating multiple systems—data lakes, data warehouses, and ETL pipelines—which increases complexity and operational overhead. Dremio simplifies this by providing a unified platform that can query data from various sources without needing to move it. Coupled with Apache Iceberg’s ability to serve as the foundation of a data lakehouse, architects can significantly reduce the need for costly and time-consuming data migrations. Iceberg’s ACID guarantees and schema evolution make it easy to manage and govern data, keeping the platform adaptable without adding maintenance burdens.
Lowering Costs: Traditional data architectures require significant resources to store, move, and process data across different systems. By leveraging Apache Iceberg’s table format directly in the data lake and combining it with Dremio’s query acceleration features like reflections, you can minimize data duplication and avoid runaway data warehousing bills. This leads to lower storage and compute costs while still delivering fast, efficient queries across large datasets.
Maximizing Adoption and Value: A well-designed data platform must be user-friendly to maximize adoption by analysts, data scientists, and other teams. Dremio’s easy-to-use SQL-based interface and semantic layer make it simple for teams to access and explore data without needing deep technical expertise. By providing a self-service experience, Dremio empowers teams to derive value from the platform quickly, reducing the reliance on IT or engineering teams and driving greater overall usage.

With Dremio and Apache Iceberg, data architects can build a scalable, low-maintenance platform that delivers high performance at a lower cost, while ensuring that it’s accessible and valuable to the entire organization.

Why Does it Matter for Data Analysts?

Data analysts often face several challenges in their day-to-day work, including navigating access to various data systems, waiting on data engineering teams for minor modeling updates, and dealing with the redundancy of different teams redefining the same metrics across multiple BI tools. These inefficiencies slow down analysis and limit the ability to deliver timely insights. Here’s how Dremio and Apache Iceberg can help overcome these hurdles:

Seamless Data Access: Analysts frequently struggle with accessing data spread across different databases, data lakes, and warehouses, often relying on data engineers to provide access or create custom queries. Dremio simplifies this process by enabling direct, self-service access to data from multiple sources through a single, easy-to-use SQL interface. Analysts can query data in real time without waiting on access requests or dealing with various systems, whether the data is stored in a data lake, database, or cloud storage.
Faster Modeling Updates: Making even minor changes to data models often involves opening tickets and waiting on data engineers to update pipelines or reformat datasets. With Dremio’s semantic layer, analysts can model and define relationships across datasets directly within the platform. This eliminates the need to wait on engineering for minor changes, allowing analysts to iterate faster and stay agile when business requirements evolve.
Consistency Across Metrics: A common pain point for analysts is the inconsistency of metrics definitions across different BI tools and teams. This redundancy leads to conflicting reports and wasted time reconciling metrics. Dremio centralizes metric definitions through its semantic layer, ensuring that all teams access a single source of truth. This reduces the need for redefining metrics across different tools and ensures consistency in analysis and reporting across the organization.

By leveraging Dremio’s self-service capabilities and Apache Iceberg’s ability to manage large datasets directly in the data lake, analysts gain faster access to data, more control over data modeling, and a unified platform that ensures consistent metrics, leading to quicker, more reliable insights.

Why Does it Matter for Data Scientists?

Enhancing Data Science Workflows with Dremio and Apache Iceberg

Data scientists face unique challenges when working with large, complex datasets across various platforms. They often struggle with data accessibility, managing ever-growing data volumes, and ensuring reproducibility and version control in their workflows. Lakehouse platforms like Dremio, combined with table formats like Apache Iceberg, offer powerful solutions to these challenges:

Simplified Data Access and Exploration: One of the biggest pain points for data scientists is gaining access to diverse data sources, often stored across different silos such as databases, data lakes, and cloud platforms. This makes data discovery and exploration cumbersome and time-consuming. Dremio’s Lakehouse Platform provides unified, self-service access to all your data, regardless of where it’s stored, through a single interface. With Dremio, data scientists can seamlessly query, analyze, and experiment with large datasets without navigating multiple systems or relying on engineering teams for access.
Scalable Data Management: As datasets grow larger and more complex, managing them in a traditional data warehouse setup becomes costly and inefficient. Apache Iceberg allows data scientists to work directly with large datasets in the data lake, eliminating the need to move data into a separate warehouse for analysis. Iceberg’s scalable table format enables efficient handling of large volumes of data while providing advanced features like hidden partitioning and ACID guarantees, ensuring that data scientists can focus on building models without worrying about performance bottlenecks.
Reproducibility and Experimentation: Ensuring reproducibility of experiments and models is critical in data science but can be challenging when data is constantly changing. Apache Iceberg’s versioning and time-travel capabilities allow data scientists to access and work with specific snapshots of the data, ensuring that experiments can be reproduced at any point in time. Dremio’s zero-copy cloning and Git-like data management features enable data scientists to create isolated, experimental environments without duplicating data, streamlining the workflow for testing models and performing “what-if” analyses.
Collaboration and Consistency: Data scientists often work closely with data engineers and analysts, and inconsistent access to data or version control can hinder collaboration. Dremio’s semantic layer provides a consistent and shared view of the data, allowing all teams to work from the same definitions and datasets, reducing inconsistencies in models and analysis. This leads to better collaboration across the organization and more reliable insights from models.

By leveraging Dremio’s Lakehouse Platform and Apache Iceberg tables, data scientists can streamline their workflows, gain faster access to critical data, ensure reproducibility, and scale their experiments more effectively, all while minimizing the complexity and overhead typically associated with large-scale data science projects.

Conclusion

Data professionals across the board—whether you’re a data engineer, architect, analyst, or scientist—face the common challenges of navigating complex data systems, maintaining performance, and ensuring scalability. As the data landscape evolves, adopting technologies that provide flexibility, reduce overhead, and improve accessibility is crucial.

Dremio and Apache Iceberg offer powerful solutions that enable you to manage your data with greater efficiency, scalability, and performance. With Dremio’s Lakehouse Platform and Iceberg’s table format, you can unify your data silos, streamline pipelines, and access real-time insights—all while lowering costs and minimizing maintenance.

If you’re looking to build a future-proof data architecture that meets the needs of your entire organization, embracing a Lakehouse approach with Dremio and Apache Iceberg will empower your teams to make better, faster decisions while keeping data governance and management simple.

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