Apache Polaris Blog on Apache Polaris

Build a Local Open Data Lakehouse with k3d, Apache Ozone, Apache Polaris and Trino

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR — Spin up a fully integrated, locally-running open data lakehouse on your laptop in under 30 minutes using Kubernetes in Docker (k3d), Apache Ozone as S3-compatible object storage, Apache Polaris as the Iceberg REST catalog and Trino as the SQL query engine. No cloud account required.

Why This Stack?🔗

The modern open data lakehouse is built on open standards: Apache Iceberg as the table format, a REST catalog to manage metadata, object storage for the actual files and a decoupled compute engine for queries. This separation lets you swap any layer without rewriting the others.

Introducing the setup Command in Apache Polaris

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction🔗

As data platforms grow, managing Apache Polaris entities—such as catalogs, principals, and their associated roles—quickly becomes a complex orchestration problem. Traditionally, setting up a new Apache Polaris environment meant executing a series of individual CLI commands or API calls.

To simplify this workflow, the Apache Polaris Python CLI now includes a setup command. This feature introduces an infrastructure-as-code approach, allowing you to define your Polaris configuration in a single YAML file and apply it with a single command.

Apache Polaris Graduates to Top Level Project!

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We are thrilled to announce that Apache Polaris has officially graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top Level Project (TLP) at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

This milestone marks a significant pivotal point for the project, moving from a promising proposal to a mature, community-governed standard for data cataloging and access control in the open data lakehouse.

What is Apache Polaris?🔗

For those who are new to the project, Polaris is a cloud-native, open-source catalog for Apache Iceberg. It provides a centralized service to manage your data across different engines and clouds, ensuring that your Iceberg tables remain interoperable and secure.

Floe and Apache Polaris: Policy-Driven Table Maintenance for Apache Iceberg

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction🔗

Iceberg tables accumulate technical debt over time. Small files multiply as streaming jobs append data in micro-batches. Delete files pile up from CDC workloads. Snapshots grow unbounded, bloating metadata. Without regular maintenance, query performance degrades, storage costs rise, and planning times stretch from milliseconds to seconds.

Apache Polaris provides a vendor-neutral Iceberg catalog with governance and access control, but it does not execute maintenance operations. The catalog manages metadata and enforces permissions. Compaction, snapshot expiration, orphan cleanup, and manifest optimization remain the user’s responsibility.

Mapping Legacy and Heterogeneous Datalakes in Apache Polaris

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction🔗

The data lake community and major engines such as Spark, Snowflake, and Trino are standardizing on the Iceberg REST catalog protocol for data discovery and access. While this shift provides the foundation for a modern lakehouse with transactions and centralized governance, many organizations still maintain significant volumes of data managed by legacy Hadoop/Hive catalogs or heterogeneous data lakes, resulting in siloed data environments with specialized query stacks.

Apache Polaris and Lance: Bringing AI-Native Storage to the Open Multimodal Lakehouse

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction🔗

We are excited to announce the integration between Apache Polaris and the Lance ecosystem, enabling users to manage Lance tables through the Apache Polaris Generic Table API. This integration brings AI-native columnar storage to the open multimodal lakehouse, allowing organizations to leverage Apache Polaris as a unified catalog for both Iceberg and Lance tables.

What is Lance?🔗

Lance is an open lakehouse format designed for multimodal AI workloads. It contains a file format, table format, and catalog spec that allows you to build a complete multimodal lakehouse on top of object storage to power your AI workflows. The key features of Lance include:

Securing S3 data with AWS KMS

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction🔗

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) provides a way to encrypt S3 data in AWS without exposing raw key material outside AWS services.

Apache Polaris supports using KMS in its catalogs backed by AWS S3 storage.

This functionality will be available in the next release after 1.3.0-incubating.

Configuring Polaris Catalog🔗

KMS settings in Polaris are relevant to S3 buckets that have been configure to use KMS on the AWS side (e.g. using SSE-KMS).

StarRocks and Apache Polaris Integration: Building a Unified, High-Performance Data Lakehouse

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction: Why StarRocks + Apache Polaris?🔗

Modern Data-Architecture Pain Points: Silos & Engine Lock-in🔗

Today’s data-driven enterprises face two chronic ailments:

Data silos : transactional data sits in RDBMS, click-streams in an S3 data lake, CRM data in a SaaS vault, etc. Cross-domain analysis requires expensive ETL and still arrives stale.
Engine lock-in : every OLAP engine optimises for its own metadata layer and file layout. Migrating to a faster or cheaper engine means re-formatting, re-writing and re-governing years of data.

Integrating Apache Polaris with PuppyGraph for Real-time Graph Analysis

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Unified data governance has become a hot topic over the last few years. As AI and other data-hungry use cases infiltrate the market, the need for a comprehensive data catalog solution with governance in mind has become critical. Apache Polaris has found its calling as an open-source solution, specifically built to handle data governed by Apache Iceberg, that is changing the way we manage and access data across various clouds, formats, and platforms. With a foundation rooted in Apache Iceberg, Apache Polaris ensures compatibility with various compute engines and data formats, making it an ideal choice for organizations focused on scalable, open data architectures.

Apache Polaris 1.1.0-incubating has been released!

Fri, 19 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Apache Polaris team is pleased to announce Apache Polaris 1.1.0-incubating.

This release includes:

New features & enhancements ** HMS support ** IMPLICIT authentication type ** Support for non-AWS S3 compatible storage with STS: MinIO, s3a scheme support ** Use of Realm instead of RealmId ** Modularized Federation Architecture ** Federated Catalog Support in Polaris CLI ** Expanded External Identity Provider support ** Python package (official) ** Documentation improvements (release process, multi-realms configuration)
Bug fixes ** Fix drop view with default server configuration ** Fix MinIO support ** Remove ThreadLocal

This release can be downloaded:

Doris X Polaris: Building Unified Data Lakehouse with Iceberg REST Catalog - A Practical Guide

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

With the continuous evolution of data lake technologies, efficiently and securely managing massive datasets stored on object storage (such as AWS S3) while providing unified access endpoints for upstream analytics engines (like Apache Doris) has become a core challenge in modern data architectures. Apache Polaris, as an open and standardized REST Catalog service for Iceberg, provides an ideal solution to this challenge. It not only handles centralized metadata management but also significantly enhances data lake security and manageability through fine-grained access control and flexible credential management mechanisms.

Apache Polaris 1.0.1-incubating has been released!

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Apache Polaris team is pleased to announce Apache Polaris 1.0.1-incubating.

This release is a maintenance release on the 1.0.1-incubating one, fixing a couple of issues on the Helm Chart:

remove db-kind in Helm Chart
add relational-jdbc to Helm Chart

This release can be downloaded:

https://polaris.apache.org/downloads/

The artifacts are available on Maven Central.

The Docker images are available on Docker Hub:

Enjoy !

The Apache Polaris team.