Why Iceberg Still Is Not the Default on Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift, Heard Directly From the Snowflake Field
Blog post from Onehouse
A debate prompted by a blog and LinkedIn post examined why Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift continue to create new tables in proprietary native formats by default despite supporting Apache Iceberg managed tables. Snowflake field representatives and other commenters defended closed formats on grounds including potential performance advantages, faster delivery of vendor-specific features, customer choice, operational simplicity, governance integration, and the view that catalogs rather than file formats are the principal source of lock-in. The author argues that these points do not justify retaining a closed default, citing vendor claims of managed Iceberg performance parity, the possibility of offering managed services over open formats, and the risk that native-first features increase future migration costs. The discussion also highlighted a perceived adoption cycle in which open formats remain optional because they are not yet widely chosen, while users may not choose them because closed formats remain the default. The author calls for open defaults for new tables, published feature trade-offs, and vendor roadmaps, while acknowledging that proprietary formats are likely to persist because cloud warehouses remain successful products whose users value their performance and ease of use.
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