Google Cloud previews direct Iceberg access in AlloyDB for PostgreSQL

[Google Cloud] Google Cloud said it is previewing direct Iceberg access in AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, letting developers query Apache Iceberg tables stored in a cloud storage bucket directly from AlloyDB and join them with live operational data in a single SQL query. The company also announced general availability of AlloyDB sync and Lakehouse federation. According to Google Cloud, the three options cover different data locations and read patterns: direct Iceberg access reads tables in place, accelerated by the AlloyDB columnar engine; AlloyDB sync serves lakehouse data from AlloyDB for latency-sensitive workloads on a user-set schedule; and Lakehouse federation queries native BigQuery tables in place with BigQuery doing the processing. Google Cloud said that in its testing on a 1 TB dataset in Cloud Storage, AlloyDB direct Iceberg access was up to 7x faster on aggregation queries than Amazon's comparable PostgreSQL-compatible service and up to 3.5x faster than the open-source PostgreSQL extension.