Public Apache Iceberg datasets via a REST catalog
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Hi HN,I’m one of the creators of this project.We noticed that while many developers want to experiment with Apache Iceberg the "entry cost" is often high. You usually have to set up your own storage buckets, configure a catalog (like Hive), and ingest data before you can even run a single SELECT statement.We wanted to lower that barrier. We’ve hosted a production-grade Iceberg REST Catalog on BigLake with public datasets (starting with the NYC Taxi data) that anyone can query.You can point Spark, Trino, or Flink directly at the REST endpoint and start querying immediately.You do need a Google Cloud Project ID for authentication/quota, but the data access itself is free and public.I’d love to hear your thoughts. Are there specific datasets or Iceberg features you’d like to see added to the dataset?
HN · launched Jan 15, 2026 · 13 upvotes (top 42%) · 0 views
Niche: database and data quality tools · 104 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -22% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Data infrastructure
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 104 launches in database and data quality tools →
Could you build this?
No Providing a public Apache Iceberg REST catalog with hosted datasets requires managing substantial cloud infrastructure, high-throughput distributed object storage, and specialized data engineering at Google Cloud scale.
What it would actually take: A production version requires deploying an Apache Iceberg REST Catalog specification implementation backed by a high-availability metadata store (like PostgreSQL/FoundationDB) and multi-terabyte cloud object storage (GCS/S3). It involves building automated ETL pipelines for public datasets, handling egress costs, multi-tenant rate limiting, and integrating engines like BigLake/Trino. This requires deep distributed systems and cloud data engineering expertise.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Trino, Spark
Concerns raised: Python access to REST catalog and datasets unclear
Feature requests: Iceberg v3 spec support (Variant, Deletion Vector), Python example for querying datasets, Trino Docker config integration
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 121 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #52 of 122 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 78 days after the earliest competitor.
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