
Apache Iceberg and the catalog layer (w/ Russell Spitzer)
From The Analytics Engineering Podcast by dbt Labs, Inc.
January 25, 2026 · 53 min
About this episode
Tristan talks with Russell Spitzer about the evolution of open table formats and the catalog layer.
Tristan talks with Russell Spitzer, a PMC member of Apache Iceberg and principal engineer at Snowflake, about the evolution of open table formats and the catalog layer. They dig into identity and access at the catalog layer and why consensus‑driven standards make interoperability possible. For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com . The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
People in this episode
Host: Tristan
Guest: Russell Spitzer
Topics covered
- open table formats
- catalog layer
- identity and access
- interoperability
- consensus-driven standards
Keywords
- Apache Iceberg
- catalog layer
- open table formats
- interoperability
- identity and access
Sponsors
dbt Labs
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Apache Iceberg, Snowflake
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- Building a multimodal lakehouse for AI (w/ Chang She) · November 23, 2025 · 57 min
- Agentic coding in analytics engineering (w/ Mikkel Dengsøe) · September 7, 2025 · 44 min
- Under the hood of Apache Iceberg (w/ Christian Thiel) · August 24, 2025 · 56 min
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