Justin Borgman: Apache Iceberg won the open table format war in 2024
Justin Borgman · Trino, Iceberg and the Battle for the Lakehouse | Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst · Jan 30, 2025 · at 47:29
Justin Borgman, CEO of Starburst, discusses the competitive landscape between open table formats including Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, and Delta Lake.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I feel like the summer of twenty-twenty-four, the world said, okay, it is Iceberg. And that was like VHS, Betamax, You know, decision made.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Justin Borgman
Borgman: Tabular acquisition gives Databricks marketing win, not open-source control
“I think probably the biggest thing that they get out of the acquisition is the ability to tell the market, That they can do iceberg two and not look like they had made a mistake with Dell with Delta. You know, that, that they can, they get sort of a marketing …”
Borgman: Databricks will not control or kill Apache Iceberg
“Iceberg has, you know, is, is bigger than Databricks, honestly. And it will continue to be, I think, the ubiquitous format. You know, so if they had hopes of, like, killing it, I don't think that worked. If they had hopes of controlling it, I don't really thin…”
Justin Borgman: Open-source enterprise infrastructure beats proprietary alternatives over time
“I believe, gradually over time, enterprise software technology, at least infrastructure technology, wherever there are two things that are mostly the same, and one is open and one is not, the open is going to win over time.”
Borgman: Presto is mostly Facebook internal, while Trino is the mainstream branch
“They started as identical copies, but the code bases have diverged quite a bit. And today Presto is really just used by Facebook. So it's sort of like their own private branch in a way used by a small number of people. And Trino has become the mainstream commu…”
Justin Borgman: Data lakehouses are the future of data architecture
“That performance gap is de minimis at this point, and that really has changed the game, and I think now lake houses are the future.”
Justin Borgman: Teradata offers unique database capabilities no competitor can match
“It's an amazing database. I will still say that now, you know, seven years later, it's an amazing database. There are things that that, that system can do that, That really nobody else on the market can do. But, ah, it's proprietary and it's expensive.”