CelerData Blog

Databricks Iceberg Managed Table Explained

Written by CelerData | Jun 13, 2025 10:21:33 PM

Apache Iceberg is fast becoming the industry standard for building reliable, performant data lakes. Designed to support massive datasets and frequent schema evolution, Iceberg brings ACID transactions, time travel, and partition evolution — all while keeping data in open, cloud-native formats like Parquet.

With last year’s acquisition of Tabular — a company founded by the original creators of Iceberg — the Data and AI company Databricks has doubled down on its commitment to open formats. The result: Iceberg Managed Tables, now launched as part of Databricks’ Data Intelligent Platform.

 

What Is Databricks Iceberg Managed Table?

Databricks Iceberg Managed Tables are Apache Iceberg tables created in Unity Catalog that any engine can read or write through the open Iceberg REST Catalog API. Because they live inside Unity Catalog, they automatically inherit the same fine-grained permissions, audit logs, lineage tracking, and predictive optimizations that already guard Delta Lake objects, ML features, and AI models. The payoff is a single catalog, a single security model, and a single place to discover, govern, and collaborate on every data and AI asset in the lakehouse.


From Governed Tables to Real-Time Insight With CelerData

Governance solves where and how data is managed. Turning that governed Iceberg data into demanding data products such as customer-facing analytics still demands speed, concurrency, and predictable cost. This is where CelerData Cloud comes in.

As an official launch partner, CelerData adds a high-performance serving layer that delivers:

  • Real-time, sub-second queries — consistent millisecond response times even when tens of thousands of requests hit per second.
  • Effortless scalability — compute warehouses spin up in minutes and keep sub-second SLAs at any concurrency, with no repartitioning or data movement.
  • Unified governance — every CelerData query respects Unity Catalog policies, delivering secure analytics alongside models, features, and datasets in a single governed platform.

Whether powering customer-facing dashboards, embedded insights, or AI agents, CelerData ensures that Iceberg remains open, fast, and secure — all the way to the last mile.

 

Get started today

Ready to put your governed Iceberg data to work? Now you can get a free trial of CelerData Cloud at cloud.celerdata.com. Sign up now and see how fast your lakehouse can go.