Santa Clara, Calif., Sept. 25, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Polaris project continues to accelerate as the community expands capabilities and adoption of the open-source, Iceberg-native catalog. Dremio, one of the original co-creators and leading contributors to Polaris, today announced both significant new contributions to the project and the publication of the first book on Polaris: Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide, released by O’Reilly Media and authored by Dremio’s Head of Developer Relations, Alex Merced.

Over the past year, Dremio engineers have played an instrumental role in advancing Apache Polaris, contributing:

• Stabilization of the Polaris runtime and integration of the Quarkus framework.
• A benchmarking framework to ensure reliability and performance at scale.
• The Iceberg catalog migrator, donated to simplify adoption of Polaris.
• Enhancements to build, CI, and testing processes for faster community innovation.
• Helm chart improvements that make deployments more flexible and production-ready.

More recently, with the release of Polaris 1.1.0, Dremio and the community introduced expanded object storage support (including MinIO and Ceph), federation with Hive Metastore, stronger authentication and external identity provider integration, as well as packaging updates for the Polaris Python client. These milestones underscore Polaris’ rapid growth as the open metadata foundation for cloud-native lakehouse systems.

"The growth of Apache Polaris is a testament to the strength of the Iceberg community," said Casey Karst, Principal Product Manager – Data Lakes at Fivetran. "By embracing open standards for metadata, Polaris makes it easier for organizations to build interoperable lakehouses and future-proof their data strategies. Fivetran Managed Data Lake has taken a dependency on the project because of its ease of use and enterprise readiness. I'm excited to see Dremio and the broader community continue to drive this critical piece of the ecosystem forward."

First Book on Apache Polaris Released by O’Reilly Media

Coinciding with this momentum, O’Reilly Media has published Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide, the first and only book dedicated to the project. Written by Alex Merced, Head of Developer Relations at Dremio, the book offers a hands-on playbook for building scalable, cloud-native lakehouse architectures with Polaris and Apache Iceberg.

Key topics include:

• Designing and operating Iceberg lakehouses in production
• Leveraging Polaris for scalable metadata management
• Integrating compute engines such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Dremio
• Implementing governance, performance optimization, and high availability strategies
  
  

“With this book, I wanted to pull back the curtain on what it takes to build resilient, open lakehouses that data teams can trust in production,” said Merced. “Polaris provides the modern metadata and open standards needed to accelerate adoption of the open lakehouse.”

Apache Polaris: The Definitive Guide is available now through O’Reilly and major book retailers. An early-release edition will also be made available by Dremio in the coming weeks. To learn more about Dremio’s involvement in other open source projects, visit the newly launched developer hub.

About the Author

Alex Merced is Head of Developer Relations at Dremio and a long-time open-source contributor. He has authored multiple technical books, created educational content for global developer communities, and is an advocate for building modern data architectures on open standards.

About Dremio

Dremio is the intelligent lakehouse platform for agentic AI, trusted by thousands of global enterprises, including Shell, TD Bank, Michelin, and Farmer's Insurance. Dremio connects your enterprise data with AI agents, providing the only lakehouse that meets the needs of both AI agents and humans. 

Traditional data platforms create critical bottlenecks for AI initiatives: getting all your data together, establishing common semantic understanding, and managing performance for AI agent queries. Dremio solves these challenges with Zero-ETL Federation for unified data access, an AI-enabled Semantic Layer provides AI agents with critical business context, and Autonomous Optimization delivers the fastest lakehouse performance without manual tuning.

Simply put, Dremio enables the agentic enterprise. 

From the original co-creators of Apache Polaris and Apache Arrow, Dremio is the only lakehouse built natively on Apache Iceberg, Polaris, and Arrow - providing flexibility, preventing lock-in, and enabling community-driven innovation.

Learn more at dremio.com.

Elise Woodard
Dremio Corporation
9494632203
elise.woodard@dremio.com

Chris McCoin
McCoin & Smith Communications
chris@mccoinsmith.com

Rick Smith
McCoin & Smith Communications
rick@mccoinsmith.com