Snowflake 2026 Data Engineering Update Snowflake 2026 Data Engineering Update Snowflake’s 2026 release stream sharpens its role as a governed lakehouse control plane. Updates span Apache Iceberg integration, external query engine interoperability, Cortex metadata intelligence, stronger governance, external volume management, and dynamic table execution. 🔹 Iceberg on Azure DLS External Volumes Data Engineering Impact: Register Iceberg tables directly in Unity Catalog while metadata lives in ADLS Gen2. No duplication of metadata silos, enabling cross-cloud lakehouse patterns. Practical Use Case: Pharma pipelines storing clinical trial data in ADLS can register Iceberg tables in Snowflake for governance, while ML workloads in Databricks query the same datasets. Snowflake Docs 🔹 Horizon + External Query Engine Access Data Engineering Impact: Horizon acts as a federation layer: external engines (Spark, Trino, F...

Apache Iceberg: The Open Table Format Reshaping the Data Lakehouse Data Engineering · Open Table Formats · 2025 Apache Iceberg : The Open Table Format Quietly Winning the Data Wars Born at Netflix to solve petabyte-scale chaos, Apache Iceberg has become the industry's de facto standard for the modern data lakehouse — and for good reason. By Arabinda Mohpatra Published May 2025 Read time ~18 min SCROLL TO READ $1B+ Databricks acquires Tabular (Iceberg's creator) — 2024 100% Snowflake commits to Apache Iceberg as sole open format 7+ Major cloud / engine providers natively supporting Iceberg #1 Most planned-adoption format per Dremio's 2024 survey 01 — Origin Story Netflix Had a Problem. A Petabyte-Scale Problem. It was 2017, and Netflix's data engineers were fi...