StarTree Inc., which sells a real-time analytics platform and cloud service based on the Apache Pinot open-source online analytical processing database, becomes the latest data analytics provider to announce full support for Apache Iceberg. The StarTree Cloud managed service will employ Iceberg as the analytic and serving layer on top of its data lakehouse. The move creates new use cases for Iceberg in real-time applications requiring high concurrency across thousands of simultaneous users. In particular, it enables Iceberg to be more easily applied to customer-facing scenarios where organizations want to expose data externally without relying on complex, multi-step pipelines. Iceberg is a management layer that sits atop data files in cloud storage to improve consistency, manageability and query performance. It has been rapidly gaining acceptance as a de facto table standard, replacing an assortment of proprietary alternatives. StarTree enables direct querying of Iceberg tables without the need to move or transform the underlying data. The integration supports open formats and leverages performance-enhancing features, including Pinot indexing and materialization, local caching and intelligent prefetching. StarTree enables various indexes and pre-aggregated materializations to be defined directly on Iceberg tables. Indexes for numerical data, text, JavaScript Object Notation, geospatial data and other types can be distributed locally on compute nodes or stored in object storage. Chief Marketing Officer Chad Meley said “By querying Iceberg directly with subsecond latency, we’re eliminating the need for intermediate pipelines, duplicate storage and external databases.”