What’s an Icehouse: Icehouse 101

An "Icehouse" refers to a data lakehouse architecture that combines the features of a data lake and a data warehouse, built specifically on Apache Iceberg for storage and Trino for compute. The data lakehouse model integrates the flexibility of storing unstructured data like a data lake while maintaining the structured, transaction-friendly aspects of a warehouse. Apache Iceberg, developed originally by Netflix, provides a robust table format that ensures data transactions are atomic, consistent, and traceable, allowing for features like time travel and partition evolution. Trino, formerly known as Presto, is an open-source SQL query engine created at Facebook to efficiently handle large-scale data analytics, offering rapid query performance across disparate data sources. Together, Iceberg and Trino form a compelling open-source stack that ensures flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness for organizations, supported by a vibrant community and diverse vendor ecosystem, with Starburst offering managed solutions to simplify deployment and maintenance.