Polaris Catalog
Snowflake Open Catalog
Establish a truly vendor-neutral foundation for your enterprise and open lakehouse with a managed service for Apache Polaris™ (incubating), open source catalog for Iceberg tables.
Apache Polaris is currently undergoing incubation at the Apache Software Foundation
Optimize flexibility
Decouple your catalog from compute to benefit from engine choice and performance.
Centralize management
Manage Iceberg tables and secure access for all users and engines in one place.
Unlock catalog portability
Keep RBAC, namespaces and table definitions wherever you run Polaris.
Keep one optimized copy of your data for many engines
Connect securely to a growing list of engines and enable all your metadata to stay synchronized across environments for read and write operations.
Automate table optimization‡ with Snowflake’s serverless compute and Apache Polaris policies, and ensure maximum performance for any engine by defining file sizes and partitions.
Secure your data
Define role base access controls for engines and users, and secure all of your Iceberg ecosystem in a single pane of glass.
Support for SSO/SAML 2.0 and OAuth makes it easy to integrate with your existing enterprise-grade user authorization flows. PrivateLink, a secure private network connectivity framework, gets you secure, interoperable connectivity without being locked into a vendor or compute stack.
Benefit from community led security and governance improvements for the entire ecosystem.
Run anywhere without lock-in
Get started in minutes with Open Catalog, Snowflake’s managed service for Apache Polaris, or self-host in your own containers.
Preserve your RBAC, namespaces and table definitions intact regardless of where the catalog is hosted — nearly eliminating migration complexity.
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Open Catalog
Frequently Asked Questions
Learn about Snowflake Open Catalog, a managed service for Apache Polaris — vendor neutral Iceberg catalog
Apache Polaris is an open-source, fully-featured catalog specifically designed for Apache Iceberg™ table format.
Snowflake Open Catalog is a managed service for Apache Polaris. It also includes enterprise grade security features for managing user authorization flows and maintaining private network connectivity among your data, engines, and Open Catalog.
Iceberg REST catalogs are catalogs that implement the Apache Iceberg REST Open API specification. This API provides a standard interface which enables integration flexibility.
Apache Polaris is a vendor-neutral, open source catalog. Polaris includes an implementation of the Iceberg REST API as well as other catalog APIs.
Snowflake Horizon Catalog provides unified governance, security, and discovery capabilities across all your data assets within the Snowflake platform. It is also the catalog for Snowflake Managed tables.
Snowflake Open Catalog is a managed service for Apache Polaris, a vendor-neutral open source catalog. Apache Polaris and Snowflake Open Catalog deliver secure, multi-engine access control and read-and-write interoperability. Iceberg tables managed by Open Catalog are Externally Managed to Snowflake.
Snowflake is designed to extend its powerful query and processing engine, performance, reliability, AI and security features to your Iceberg tables, whether they are Snowflake Managed or Externally Managed. Write capability for Externally Managed tables is coming to General Availability soon.
Absolutely. When you use Iceberg tables within Snowflake, they benefit from Snowflake Horizon Catalog's robust, built-in security and governance framework. This includes powerful capabilities like Fine-Grained Access Control (FGAC), Risk Monitoring, and Vulnerability Management, helping protect your Iceberg data with the same enterprise-grade security as other data products in Snowflake.
Yes, absolutely. Since Snowflake Open Catalog is a managed service for the vendor-neutral Apache Polaris, it is designed to enable seamless read and write access to your Iceberg tables by any compatible engine. This gives you full flexibility to use the tools you prefer while managing your catalog centrally.
