Concept card

SAP × Dremio — Iceberg-Native Lakehouse for Agentic AI (acquisition closed July 2026)

As of 2026-10-04

Edited by Cédric Mary, sole editor and publication director — 27 years in the SAP ecosystem. How these pages are produced, and where automation is used.

What is SAP × Dremio?

SAP announced the acquisition of Dremio on 4 May 2026 and completed it on 6 July 2026 (terms undisclosed). Dremio is an open lakehouse platform — lead contributor to Apache Iceberg, co-creator of Apache Arrow and Apache Polaris. SAP's stated plan: make Business Data Cloud Apache Iceberg-native, add a universal catalog on Polaris and the Iceberg REST Catalog API, federate SAP and non-SAP data without movement, and use it as a foundation for SAP Knowledge Graph. Integration is in progress; separate what is announced from what ships.

The facts, dated

4 May 2026 — announcement. SAP announces its intent to acquire Dremio "to unify SAP and non-SAP data to power agentic AI". Expected close: Q3 2026, subject to regulatory approval. Financial terms not disclosed. SAP commits to continue investing in the open-source projects central to Dremio.
6 July 2026 — completion. SAP completes the acquisition. The completion release states the goal: let customers combine SAP and non-SAP data to run analytical and AI workloads in real time, with no data movement or conversion, and with improved economics for enterprise analytics.
August 2026 — first demos. SAP community posts show Joule reasoning over a Dremio lakehouse through SAP AI Core, answering a natural-language inventory question with a governed result and chart in about six seconds end to end, without ETL, entirely on SAP BTP. Treat this as a demo, not a product release.

Status update: the deal is closed; product integration milestones, however, have not been published as dated GA commitments in the sources reviewed.

What Dremio is

Dremio describes itself as an open, high-performance, serverless and elastic lakehouse platform. Its technical pedigree matters for architects: it is a lead contributor to Apache Iceberg (open table format with schema evolution and time travel), co-creator of Apache Arrow (columnar in-memory format and transport) and co-creator of Apache Polaris (an open catalog implementing the Iceberg REST Catalog API). The value proposition is query federation and acceleration over data that stays in open formats in object storage and other sources.

Why it matters

The Dremio deal is closed (6 July 2026), so it is no longer a rumour to hedge but a roadmap to track — without promising undated features.
An Iceberg-native BDC with a Polaris-based catalog changes the openness argument against Snowflake- and Databricks-centred architectures.
SAP positions Dremio as a foundation for SAP Knowledge Graph and agentic AI, which raises the question of which catalog and semantic layer is authoritative.

Key points

Announced 4 May 2026; completed 6 July 2026; terms not disclosed.
Dremio: open, serverless lakehouse; lead contributor to Apache Iceberg, co-creator of Apache Arrow and Apache Polaris.
Plan: SAP Business Data Cloud becomes Apache Iceberg-native — SAP and non-SAP data without movement or conversion.
Universal catalog on Apache Polaris and the Iceberg REST Catalog API.
Positioned as a foundation for SAP Knowledge Graph (business relationships, regulatory classifications).
Complements BDC Connect (zero-copy outbound sharing) and HANA Cloud (in-memory AI database).
August 2026 community demos: Joule over a Dremio lakehouse via SAP AI Core — demos, not a GA feature.
No dated GA roadmap for Dremio capabilities in BDC found in SAP sources as of 23 Sep 2026.

Terms used on this page

Apache Iceberg: Open table format for large analytic datasets with schema evolution, time travel and multi-engine access.
Apache Arrow: Columnar in-memory data format and transport used for fast analytics and data exchange; Dremio co-created it.
Apache Polaris: Open-source catalog implementing the Iceberg REST Catalog API; basis of SAP's announced universal catalog.
Iceberg REST Catalog API: Standard API through which engines discover and manage Iceberg tables in a shared catalog.
Query federation: Running one query across several sources where the data lives, without copying it into a central store first.
BDC Connect: Zero-copy sharing of SAP data products and metadata to partner platforms.

Sources

Full card available to members. What the full card adds: the full decision framework · the SAP vs Snowflake / Databricks / Fabric comparison · the common pitfalls and their fix · the cheat sheet · the architecture schemas · the code blocks · the facts worth quoting.

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