Apache Iceberg is a cornerstone of modern open lakehouse architectures, designed to bring reliability and interoperability to data lakes. But how does its architecture differ from traditional Snowflake-native tables—and why does that matter?

In this session, we’ll unpack the core design of Apache Iceberg, explain how metadata, manifests, and snapshots work together, and why catalogs play a critical role in managing table state. We’ll also look at Snowflake’s Horizon Catalog and Open Catalog, and dive into the key differences between Iceberg tables and native Snowflake tables, including performance, interoperability, and management trade-offs.

Join us to explore how Iceberg enables open and extensible lakehouse solutions—and what that means when working with Snowflake.