Before the Iceberg REST Catalog spec, metadata access was tightly coupled to specific engines, JVMs, or deployment patterns.

The Iceberg REST Catalog specification changes that. It decouples table management from engine-specific implementations, opening the door to broader interoperability, lighter-weight clients, and a more modular, composable ecosystem.

1. What Catalogs Were Like Before REST – Why Hive Metastore was brittle, Java-based catalogs limited flexibility, and cross-engine compatibility challenges

2. What the REST Spec Enables – A truly open interface for listing tables, fetching schemas, committing snapshots, and creating metadata transactions

3. Where It’s Going – How REST unlocks remote catalog access for non-Java tools, empowers projects like Polaris and Lakekeeper, and simplifies deploying Iceberg in multi-tenant, cloud-native architectures.

We’ll walk through examples of how query engines like Trino and DuckDB interact with REST catalogs today.

This session will show you why the Iceberg REST spec is one of the most powerful pieces of the modern lakehouse.