# Apache Iceberg vs Databricks

| Attribute | Apache Iceberg | Databricks |
|---|---|---|
| **Vioscale score** | 62.2 (56% (medium)) | 59.8 (48% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | - |
| adoption.dependent_repos | 1 | - |
| adoption.github_stars | 9,176 | - |
| adoption.package_downloads_weekly | 11,384,061 | - |
| deployment.options | `{"self_hosted":true}` | `{"cloud":true}` |
| description.long | Apache Iceberg is a table format that enables reliable, ACID-compliant SQL operations on big data. It allows multiple query engines—such as Spark, Trino, Flink, Hive, and Impala—to safely read and write the same tables concurrently, bringing traditional database semantics to analytics workloads. | Databricks is a unified data, analytics, and AI platform for enterprises that combines data warehousing, machine learning, and AI agent capabilities through its lakehouse architecture and serverless Postgres offering (Lakebase). |
| features.capabilities | `{"deployment":"embedded","data_sharing":true,"license_class":"permissive","table_formats":"Iceberg (Parquet, ORC, Avro, Puffin data files)","semi_structured":"first_class","federation_query":true,"streaming_ingest":true,"concurrency_scaling":"automatic"}` | `{"in_db_ml":true,"deployment":"managed","sql_dialect":"vendor","architecture":"separated","data_sharing":true,"compute_model":"serverless","license_class":"proprietary","table_formats":"Delta, Iceberg","semi_structured":"first_class","streaming_ingest":true,"concurrency_scaling":"automatic"}` |
| integrations.count | 20 | 6 |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Spark"},{"name":"Trino"},{"name":"Presto"},{"name":"Flink"},{"name":"Hive"},{"name":"Impala"},{"name":"PyArrow"},{"name":"DuckDB"},{"name":"Polars"},{"name":"Pandas"},{"name":"Ray"},{"name":"Datafusion"},{"name":"BigQuery"},{"name":"SQLAlchemy"},{"name":"S3"},{"name":"GCS"},{"name":"Azure Data Lake Storage"},{"name":"Hadoop"},{"name":"Kerberos"},{"name":"Thrift"}]` | `[{"name":"Teams"},{"name":"Slack"},{"name":"Confluence"},{"name":"Power Platform"},{"name":"Copilot Studio"},{"name":"Zerobus"}]` |
| language.primary | Java | - |
| license.spdx | Apache-2.0 | - |
| market.availability | - | `{"primaryMarkets":["US"],"availabilityScope":"global","availableCountries":[],"notAvailableCountries":[]}` |
| platform.support | - | `{"web":true}` |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","summary":"Open source, no licensing cost","sourceUrl":"https://iceberg.apache.org","retrievedAt":"2026-08-14T08:32:59.428Z"}` | `{"type":"usage","plans":[{"free":false,"name":"Data Engineering","summary":"From $0.15 / DBU per second","features":["Orchestrate data processing","Build streaming and batch pipelines","Ingest data from multiple sources"],"components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"DBU"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.15,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Orchestrate data processing, machine learning and analytics pipelines","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Data Warehousing","summary":"From $0.22 / DBU per second","features":["SQL analytics","BI reporting","Available in Classic and Serverless compute"],"components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"DBU"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.22,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Run SQL queries for BI reporting, analytics and visualization","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Interactive Workloads","summary":"From $0.40 / DBU per second","features":["Data science workloads","Build custom applications","Security and governance"],"components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"DBU"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.4,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Run interactive data science and machine learning workloads","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Operational Database","summary":"From $0.069 / CU per second","features":["Postgres database","Data and feature serving"],"components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"CU"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.069,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Fully-managed Postgres transactional database for data and feature serving","contactSales":false},{"free":false,"name":"Artificial Intelligence","summary":"From $0.07 / DBU per second","features":["GenAI applications","Model Serving","AI Functions","Model Training"],"components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"DBU"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.07,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"Build production-quality GenAI or ML applications","contactSales":false},{"free":true,"name":"Genie","summary":"From $0.07 / DBU beyond free usage","features":["Natural language Q&A","AI Coding Assistant","Enterprise Knowledge access"],"components":[{"per":{"qty":1,"unit":"DBU"},"kind":"metered","amount":0.07,"currency":"USD"}],"description":"AI assistance for every team with natural language query access","contactSales":false}],"summary":"Pay-as-you-go usage-based pricing from $0.069 / DBU or CU per second. Committed Use Contracts available for volume discounts. Free tier available.","currency":"USD","freeTier":true,"sourceUrl":"https://databricks.com","retrievedAt":"2026-08-03T12:39:38.438Z","startingPrice":{"amount":0.069,"period":"month","currency":"USD"}}` |
| pricing.free_tier | - | yes |
| pricing.model | open_source | commercial |
| pricing.price_level | free | low |
| pricing.transparent | - | yes |
| release.cadence_days | 50 | - |
| release.history | `[{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.11.0","date":"2026-05-20T08:47:57Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.11.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.2","date":"2026-05-18T21:58:12Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.1","date":"2025-12-22T22:04:42Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.10.0","date":"2025-09-11T15:08:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.10.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.2","date":"2025-07-18T13:44:58Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.1","date":"2025-05-28T16:52:05Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.9.0","date":"2025-04-28T06:27:16Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.9.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.2","date":"2025-03-19T10:12:37Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.8.1","date":"2025-02-28T07:52:17Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.8.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.8.0","date":"2025-02-13T09:13:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.8.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.1","date":"2024-12-06T20:01:03Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.7.0","date":"2024-11-08T15:12:01Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.7.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.6.1","date":"2024-08-27T17:47:30Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.6.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.6.0","date":"2024-07-23T12:06:44Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.6.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.2","date":"2024-05-16T07:50:32Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.1","date":"2024-04-30T12:43:30Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.1"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.5.0","date":"2024-03-11T11:00:15Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.5.0"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.3","date":"2023-12-27T17:15:46Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.3"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.2","date":"2023-11-07T16:44:26Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.2"},{"url":"https://github.com/apache/iceberg/releases/tag/apache-iceberg-1.4.1","date":"2023-10-23T11:03:35Z","type":"stable","version":"apache-iceberg-1.4.1"}]` | - |
| reliability.status_page | yes | yes |
| security.disclosure_policy | yes | yes |
| security.scorecard | 7.9 | - |
| security.vulnerabilities | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=pypi&package_name=apache-iceberg&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` | - |

## Capabilities (Data Warehouse Software)

| Capability | Apache Iceberg | Databricks |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Deployment** |  |  |
| Deployment | Embedded | Managed cloud |
| **Architecture** |  |  |
| Architecture | - | Separated storage/compute |
| Compute model | - | Serverless |
| **Query** |  |  |
| SQL dialect | - | Vendor-specific |
| Federation / lakehouse query-in-place | ✓ | - |
| **Interoperability** |  |  |
| Table-format support | Iceberg (Parquet, ORC, Avro, Puffin data files) | Delta, Iceberg |
| **Scale** |  |  |
| Concurrency scaling | Automatic | Automatic |
| **Ingestion** |  |  |
| Streaming ingest | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Data model** |  |  |
| Semi-structured (JSON/VARIANT) | First-class | First-class |
| **Analytics** |  |  |
| ML / in-DB functions | - | ✓ |
| **Sharing** |  |  |
| Data sharing / marketplace | ✓ | ✓ |
| **Licensing** |  |  |
| Licence class | Permissive OSS | Proprietary |

*Source: Vioscale. Generated 2026-09-01T17:12:32.439Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*