Open format sharing

Snowflake supports sharing open table formats — including Apache Iceberg™ tables and Delta Lake tables — across regions, clouds, and engines, without requiring you to build ETL pipelines or duplicate data. Data stays in place while Snowflake handles governance, replication, and access control.

Open format sharing supports the following use cases:

  • Access Iceberg data in Snowflake. Bring external Iceberg tables into Snowflake using a catalog-linked database or an external volume. Query tables managed by external catalogs such as Apache Polaris™, Databricks Unity Catalog, or AWS Glue directly from Snowflake. For more information, see Access Iceberg data in Snowflake.

  • Share open table formats with Snowflake consumers. Share Iceberg and Delta Lake tables with other Snowflake accounts using direct shares, listings, or Cross-Cloud Auto-Fulfillment. Snowflake manages replication and storage across regions and clouds. For more information, see Using auto-fulfillment with open table formats.

  • Share data with non-Snowflake consumers. Share live, read-only Iceberg table data with consumers outside Snowflake using standard Iceberg REST Catalog APIs. External consumers connect using any IRC-compatible engine or tool. For more information, see Share data with non-Snowflake consumers.

Zero-ETL sharing for open table formats — register data in Snowflake Horizon Catalog, then share cross-region and cross-cloud to commercial and government cloud consumers