Open Interoperability: Delivering Customer Choice
Snowflake, Wednesday, July 15th, 2026
Snowflake contrasts its Horizon Catalog with Databricks Unity Catalog, arguing true interoperability requires bidirectional Iceberg REST support.
Snowflake defines open interoperability as securely accessing governed data through open, published, standards-based interfaces while reducing vendor lock-in.
Authors Carlos Nai and Jim Lebonitte compare Snowflake's Horizon Catalog, built on Apache Polaris, with Databricks Unity Catalog and argue that genuine interoperability requires bidirectional read-write capability via the Iceberg REST Catalog protocol.
They criticize Unity Catalog for supporting only inbound federation, blocking writes to external Iceberg tables, and requiring long-lived IAM credentials.
Snowflake claims Horizon Catalog implements the Iceberg REST standard end to end with vended credentials in both directions and full DML on external tables.