Snowflake Bets Big on Open Data Interoperability

Snowflake is expanding its open data strategy with support for Apache Iceberg V3, bringing production-ready features including geospatial data types, row-level lineage tracking, deletion vectors and nanosecond timestamp precision. The company argues that fragmented pipelines and inconsistent governance act as a costly tax on AI investment. Beyond data formats, Snowflake is pushing governance portability through Apache Polaris, an open-source catalog designed to move access controls and semantic context across platforms without copying data. The announcement also highlights pg_lake, a PostgreSQL extension that enables direct querying of data lake formats and eliminates ETL pipelines between transactional and analytical systems.