Apache Iceberg: The Interoperability Layer Between OLTP and OLAP

Russell Spitzer, Principal Engineer and Apache Iceberg PMC member at Snowflake, on Iceberg as the interoperability layer between transactional and analytical systems. He starts from his DataStax years building Cassandra's analytics integrations, including Apache Pig, and the pattern they used to move data out: a select star broken into many bounded queries, which is still how the Spark JDBC driver works. Why that pattern has neither atomicity -- records arrive from different moments of the scan -- nor transactional semantics, so a job that fails halfway through a batch of upserts cannot be wound back.