
The Iceberg ecosystem today (w/ Anders Swanson)
From The Analytics Engineering Podcast by dbt Labs, Inc.
March 8, 2026 · 55 min
About this episode
Tristan discusses the current state of the Apache Iceberg ecosystem with Anders Swanson.
Tristan sits down with Anders Swanson, a developer experience advocate at dbt Labs, to talk about the state of the Apache Iceberg ecosystem. They unpack the "open standards" shift, define the core building blocks (query engines, object stores, catalogs), and dig into why external catalogs have become a fourth namespace tier across platforms. Anders outlines a pragmatic, phased adoption model for Iceberg integrations, explains why metadata performance and resiliency are hard requirements, and clarifies why vended credentials exist and what they solve. 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: Anders Swanson
Topics covered
- Apache Iceberg
- open standards
- metadata performance
- data integration
- developer experience
Keywords
- Apache Iceberg
- open standards
- metadata
- data integration
- developer experience
- vended credentials
Sponsors
dbt Labs
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Apache Iceberg
More episodes of The Analytics Engineering Podcast
- Apache Iceberg and the catalog layer (w/ Russell Spitzer) · January 25, 2026 · 53 min
- AI and the data lake (w/ Lauren Anderson) · January 11, 2026 · 54 min
- Inside Snowflake's AI roadmap (w/ Chris Child) · December 14, 2025 · 57 min
- 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
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Analytics Engineering Podcast podcast page.