Dremio, Apache Iceberg and their role in AI-Ready Data

AI models, whether for machine learning or deep learning, require vast amounts of data to train, validate, and test. But not just any data will do—this data must be accessible, scalable, and optimized for efficient processing. This is where the concept of "AI-ready data" comes into play.

"AI-ready data" refers to data that meets specific criteria to support the demands of AI development: it must be accessible for easy access, scalable for large volumes, and governed to ensure compliance. Ensuring data meets these criteria can be challenging, especially with the complexity of modern data landscapes that include data lakes, databases, warehouses, and more.

Let's explore the critical roles Dremio and Apache Iceberg play in making data AI-ready. By leveraging these tools, data teams can prepare, manage, and optimize structured data to meet the demands of AI workloads, helping organizations scale their AI development efficiently.

What is AI-Ready Data?

For data to be truly AI-ready, it must meet several key requirements. Here’s a look at the core attributes of AI-ready data and why each is essential in AI development:

Accessibility: Data should be accessible from various environments and applications. AI models often rely on multiple data sources, and having data that’s readily accessible without extensive ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes saves time and resources.
Scalability: AI workloads are typically data-intensive. To scale, data must be stored in formats that allow for efficient retrieval and processing at scale, without performance bottlenecks.
Transformability: AI models often require data in a particular structure or with certain attributes. AI-ready data should support complex transformations to fit the needs of different models, whether it’s feature engineering, data normalization, or other preprocessing steps.
Governance: Ensuring compliance is crucial, especially when working with sensitive data. Governance controls, such as access rules and audit trails, ensure that data usage aligns with privacy policies and regulatory requirements. Governance is also important for model accuracy—making sure the model isn’t trained on irrelevant or unauthorized data.

Preparing data that meets these criteria can be difficult, particularly when handling vast amounts of structured and unstructured data across multiple systems. However, with tools like Apache Iceberg and Dremio, data teams can address these challenges and streamline structured data preparation for AI workloads.

How Apache Iceberg Enables AI-Ready Structured Data

Apache Iceberg is a powerful open table format designed for large-scale, structured data in data lakes. Its unique capabilities help make data AI-ready by ensuring accessibility, scalability, and flexibility in data management. Here’s how Iceberg supports the requirements of AI-ready data:

Accessible, Transformable Data at Scale: Apache Iceberg enables large-scale structured data to be easily accessed and transformed within data lakes, ensuring that data can be queried and modified without the complexities typically associated with data lake storage. Iceberg’s robust schema evolution and versioning features allow data to stay accessible and flexible, accommodating changing requirements for AI models.
Historical Data Benchmarking with Time Travel: Iceberg’s time-travel functionality allows data teams to query historical versions of data, making it possible to benchmark models against different points in time. This is invaluable for training models on data snapshots from various periods, allowing comparison and validation with past data states.
Partition Evolution for Data Optimization: Iceberg’s partition evolution feature enables experimentation with partitioning strategies, helping data teams optimize how data is organized and retrieved. Optimized partitioning allows for faster data access and retrieval, which can reduce model training time and improve overall efficiency.

With these features, Apache Iceberg helps maintain structured data that’s accessible, transformable, and optimized, creating a robust foundation for AI workloads in data lakes.

How Dremio Empowers AI-Ready Data Management

Dremio provides a unified data platform that enhances the management and accessibility of data, making it an ideal tool for preparing AI-ready data. Here are some of the ways Dremio’s features support AI development:

First-Class Support for Apache Iceberg: Dremio integrates seamlessly with Apache Iceberg, allowing users to manage and query Iceberg tables without complex configurations. This makes it easier for data teams to leverage Iceberg’s capabilities directly within Dremio.
Data Federation Across Multiple Sources: Dremio enables federated queries across databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouse catalogs, providing a unified view of disparate data sources. This removes data silos and allows AI models to access and utilize data from a variety of sources without moving or duplicating data.
Curated Views for Simplified Data Wrangling: Dremio allows users to create curated views on top of multiple data sources, simplifying data wrangling and transformation. These views provide a streamlined view of the data, making it easier to prepare data for AI without extensive data processing.
Integrated Catalog with Versioning: Dremio’s integrated catalog supports versioning with multi-table branching, merging, and tagging. This allows data teams to create replicable data snapshots and zero-copy experimental environments, making it easy to experiment, tag datasets, and manage different versions of data used for AI development.
Apache Arrow Flight for Fast Data Access: Dremio supports Apache Arrow Flight, a high-performance protocol that allows data to be pulled from Dremio at speeds much faster than traditional JDBC. This significantly accelerates data retrieval for model training, reducing overall model development time.
Comprehensive SQL Functions for Data Wrangling: Dremio provides a rich set of SQL functions that help data teams perform complex transformations and data wrangling tasks, making it efficient to prepare data for AI workloads.
Granular Access Controls: Dremio offers role-based, row-based, and column-based access controls, ensuring that only authorized data is used for model training. This helps maintain compliance and prevents models from training on sensitive or unauthorized data.
Query Acceleration with Data Reflections: Dremio’s data reflections feature enables efficient query acceleration by creating optimized representations of datasets, tailored for specific types of queries. Data reflections reduce the need to repeatedly process raw data, instead offering pre-aggregated or pre-sorted versions that speed up query performance. For AI workloads, this translates to faster data retrieval, especially when models require frequent access to large or complex datasets, significantly reducing wait times during model training and experimentation.

By combining data federation, powerful data wrangling tools, integrated catalog management, and high-performance data access, Dremio empowers teams to manage data effectively for AI, supporting a seamless flow from raw data to AI-ready datasets.

Use Cases: Dremio and Apache Iceberg for AI Workloads

Let’s look at some practical scenarios where Dremio and Apache Iceberg streamline data preparation for AI workloads, showcasing how they help overcome common challenges in AI development:

Training Models on Historical Data Snapshots: With Iceberg’s time-travel capabilities, data teams can train models on historical snapshots, enabling AI models to learn from data as it existed in different periods. This is particularly useful for time-sensitive applications, such as financial forecasting or customer behavior analysis, where benchmarking against historical trends is essential.
Experimenting with Data Optimization for Faster Model Training: Iceberg’s partition evolution and Dremio’s curated views allow data teams to experiment with data layouts and transformations. By optimizing data partitioning, models can retrieve data faster, resulting in more efficient model training and faster experimentation cycles.
Creating Zero-Copy Experimental Environments: With Dremio’s integrated catalog versioning, data teams can create isolated, zero-copy environments to test AI models on different datasets or data versions without affecting the original data. This enables rapid prototyping and experimentation, allowing data scientists to try different approaches and configurations safely and efficiently.
Unified Access to Diverse Data Sources for AI Development: Dremio’s federated query capabilities enable AI models to access data across multiple sources, such as relational databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. This allows data scientists to bring together diverse datasets without moving or duplicating data, providing a more comprehensive training set for their models.
Ensuring Compliance with Fine-Grained Access Controls: Dremio’s role-based, row-based, and column-based access controls ensure that AI models train only on permissible data. This level of data governance is crucial for models that must meet regulatory standards, such as those in healthcare, finance, or other highly regulated industries.

Conclusion

Having access to "AI-ready data" is paramount for developing models that are accurate, efficient, and compliant. Dremio and Apache Iceberg are instrumental in creating a robust foundation for AI workloads, making it easy to access, transform, and manage large-scale structured data.

With Iceberg, data teams gain control over data management at scale, leveraging features like time travel and partition evolution to keep data organized and optimized. Dremio complements this with seamless Iceberg integration, federated data access, and powerful data wrangling capabilities, enabling a smooth path from raw data to AI-ready datasets.

Together, Dremio and Apache Iceberg provide an end-to-end solution that empowers data teams to meet the demands of modern AI. Whether you’re building models on historical data, experimenting with data partitions, or ensuring compliance with strict governance rules, Dremio and Iceberg offer the tools you need to manage and optimize data, setting the stage for successful AI development.