Tabular launches with promise of a ‘headless’ data warehouse • The Register

Builders of Apache Iceberg — the open-source undertaking that originated at Netflix — have launched sign-up of their first product, an information platform for the open desk format, which has gained assist from trade huge hitters together with Cloudera, Google and Snowflake.

Launching the service with a weblog, the corporate stated Tabular was “the whole lot you want in your knowledge platform — aside from compute.”

The concept is it turns into the storage half of an information warehouse that customers “can simply join” to their “device of selection, from Python notebooks to full question engines.”

“Tabular is a managed metastore catalog built-in with role-based entry controls and a swarm of automated providers,” the corporate stated.

Apache Iceberg is an open table format designed for large-scale analytical workloads whereas supporting question engines together with Spark, Trino, Flink, Presto, Hive and Impala. The know-how guarantees to assist customers convey their analytics engine of option to their knowledge with out going by the expense and inconvenience of transferring it to a brand new knowledge retailer, and has seen Google, Snowflake, Cloudera and knowledge lake startup Dremio announce their assist.

Iceberg was developed at Netflix by Ryan Blue and Dan Weeks, now co-founder/CEO and co-founder/head of engineering at Tabular, respectively. The corporate was additionally based by head of product Jason Reid, one other Netflix alumnus.

In a weblog, Blue stated: “It’s been greater than seven years since Dan and I met up for espresso to speak a couple of job at Netflix — and ended up spending the complete time speaking about knowledge infrastructure challenges. A pair years later, we noticed these early concepts begin coming to life after we created Apache Iceberg. We lastly had a stable basis to construct on. And right this moment we’re taking one other step by releasing Tabular, our model of the information platform we dreamt up over espresso, however constructed with the most effective practices and classes realized within the meantime by operating the v1 platform at Netflix.”

Within the first half of 2021, Tabular secured funding from a16z, the enterprise capitalist biz co-founded by internet pioneer Marc Andreessen.

Though it didn’t disclose the funding determine, an a16z blog saying the backing stated Tabular may very well be considered informally as a “headless” knowledge warehouse.

“The place firms like Databricks and Snowflake pioneered the technical separation of storage and compute, we imagine Tabular will full the method by additionally separating these sources on the vendor degree. This implies prospects will have the ability to mix-and-match the most effective knowledge administration and knowledge processing programs to finest meet their wants,” the submit stated. ®