Google Cloud’s open lakehouse: Architected for AI, open data, and unrivaled performance

Google's Data Cloud is a uniquely integrated platform that features an open lakehouse architecture for multimodal data, infused with AI, and built on Google's planet-scale infrastructure. Snap Inc. credits the Data Cloud and open lakehouse architecture for empowering their data engineers and scientists. Google is announcing innovations to its AI-powered lakehouse, including BigLake Iceberg native storage, united operational and analytical engines, and performance acceleration for BigQuery SQL. The BigLake foundation allows customers to seamlessly interoperate on the same Iceberg open data foundation using BigQuery for analytical workloads and AlloyDB for PostgreSQL to target operational needs. The Lightning Engine for Apache Spark is designed to supercharge Apache Spark, leveraging optimized data connectors, efficient columnar shuffle operations, in-built caching, and vectorized execution. The Dataplex Universal Catalog extends AI-powered intelligence and unified governance across the Google Cloud data estate, automatically discovering and organizing metadata from data to AI. AI-native notebooks and tooling improve developer experiences, with Gemini-powered notebooks, PySpark code generation, and code extensions for JupyterLab and Visual Studio Code. The innovations set a new standard for openness, intelligence, and performance, empowering data engineers, scientists, and analysts to do more with their data assets. The Dataplex Universal Catalog is powered by AI, transforming metadata into dynamic, actionable intelligence, and enabling semantic search with natural language.