Snowflake Pushes Open Interoperability With OSI Release, pg_lake, and Incoming Iceberg v3 Support

The shift signals a push for full portability across engines, covering data, policy, semantics.

Overview

Snowflake published the first Open Semantic Interchange spec under an Apache 2 license to share metrics, dimensions, and relationships across tools.
Snowflake open-sourced pg_lake, a Postgres extension that reads data-lake files in place and natively manages Apache Iceberg tables.
Broader support for Apache Iceberg v3 on Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables is planned for general availability soon, including VARIANT data, row lineage, deletion vectors, nanosecond timestamps, and geospatial types.
Through Apache Polaris, the donated Iceberg catalog, Snowflake is working on Policy Exchange, Governance Federation, and Read Restriction APIs so fine-grained access rules travel with the data and can be enforced by any engine.
Iceberg is an open table format that lets multiple analytics engines read and write the same tables safely, which reduces data copies, cuts costs, and supports time travel, schema changes, and ACID reliability.