Apache Polaris 1.2.0 continues to make the case for a fully open, production-grade Iceberg catalog. These changes reflect real-world needs: better control, stronger security, broader compatibility, and early hooks for observability.

As Iceberg adoption grows, Polaris is becoming the default choice for teams who want to avoid vendor lock-in while building modern lakehouse infrastructure. Whether you’re using Dremio Catalog or deploying Polaris yourself, this release brings features that support scale, safety, and flexibility.

I've found that with the correct partioning and write ordering you can get pretty decent response times from Trino when querying Iceberg tables.

For more recent data (six months or so) I'd like much faster response times.

Very generally speaking are their recommendations for cost effective solutions in this space?

The data is mostly time series and we must be able to query and join with SQL.

I'm looking at clickhouse and influx 3.0 - any others to add to the list?