By Renato Losio
Publication Date: 2026-05-23 08:42:00
At the Apache Iceberg Summit last month, Google announced new interoperability features for Apache Iceberg in BigQuery. The preview of the serverless Iceberg REST catalog lets teams create, update, and query the same Apache Iceberg tables in BigQuery and in engines like Spark, Flink, and Trino without duplicating data.
The preview allows multiple tools to work on the same datasets without copying data or relying on proprietary formats. The cloud provider also introduced managed support for metadata, table maintenance, and synchronization tasks commonly handled manually in Iceberg deployments. Yuriy Zhovtobryukh, senior product manager at Google, and Angela Soares, senior product marketing manager at Google, explain why it matters:
If you’re building a lakehouse today, you’re probably using Apache Iceberg, which has gained massive popularity among data platform teams that need to support multiple compute engines (like Spark and BigQuery) that access the same data for…