One Iceberg MCP Server, Seven Catalogs: What It Takes to Reach Each One

7.4 relevance

Practical MCP server for Iceberg catalogs with high actionability and data engineering relevance.

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Why It Matters

For a Solutions Architect focused on AI agent orchestration, this demonstrates how to give coding agents direct, read-only access to Iceberg metadata across multiple cloud data lakes using a single MCP server, simplifying multi-catalog data exploration.

Key Takeaways

Set up the MCP server locally with Polaris first, then extend to your cloud catalogs by adding entries to catalogs.yaml.

One Iceberg MCP Server, Seven Catalogs: What It Takes to Reach Each One

Summary

An MCP server for Apache Iceberg tables connects to seven REST catalogs—Polaris, BigLake, OneLake, AWS Glue, S3 Tables, Snowflake Horizon—by swapping a single environment variable and a YAML config file. It exposes four read-only tools (list_tables, describe_table, count_rows, scan_table) over stdio JSON-RPC without an MCP SDK. The guide starts with a local Polaris catalog in Docker, then adds each managed catalog with its own login and storage package; Databricks Unity was not tested due to expired trial.

Author

xbill