Serving data from Apache Iceberg lakehouses fast and fresh with Spanner columnar engine (selected)

The divide between data in operational databases and analytical data lakehouses is disappearing fast. As businesses increasingly adopt zero ETL lakehouse architectures, the challenge shifts from simply storing data in an open data format such as Apache Iceberg to serving it with the low-latency performance and speed that modern applications and AI agents require. Whether it’s a cybersecurity provider like Palo Alto Networks requiring real-time threat detection insights, or a telecommunications giant like Vodafone looking to reimagine data workflows for better customer experiences, organizations need to serve precomputed insights and AI models at scale. To help, today, we are excited to announce the preview of the Spanner columnar engine , which allows you to serve your Iceberg lakehouse data with the scale and low latency of Google’s Spanner. Uniting OLTP and analytics: The Spanner columnar engine Traditionally, organizations had to choose between the high-performance transactional cap