As companies collect massive amounts of data to fuel their artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives, finding the right data architecture for storing, managing, and accessing such data is crucial. Traditional data storage practices are likely to fall short to meet the scale, variety, and velocity required by modern AI/ML workflows. Apache Iceberg steps in as a strong open-source table format to build solid and efficient data lakes for AI and ML.
What Is Apache Iceberg?
Apache Iceberg is an open table format for big analytical datasets, initially built at Netflix. It solves many of the limitations of data lakes, especially when handling the needs of AI/ML workloads. Iceberg offers a table layer over file systems or object stores, introducing database-like functionality into data lakes. The most important aspects that make Iceberg valuable for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning workloads are: