Hi folks,
We have to report this month.
I drafted the following report:
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## Description:
The mission of Apache Polaris is the creation and maintenance of software
related to a catalog for data lakes. It provides new levels of choice,
flexibility and control over data, with full enterprise security and Apache
Iceberg interoperability across a multitude of engines and infrastructure
## Project Status:
Current project status: Healthy and active.
Apache Polaris continues to operate as a regular Top-Level Project. This
quarter the project shipped two feature releases and one release of a
companion tool (Iceberg Catalog Migrator), added a new committer, and
continued design work on expanding the catalog's scope (sharing, tagging,
directories, transactions) on the dev list.
Compared with the previous report: contributor growth accelerated (76 people
opened pull requests this quarter, up from 57), and the main challenge has
shifted from producing changes to reviewing them: the open pull request
backlog grew from 102 to 137. The community is discussing this openly on the
dev list (see Community Health). The monthly release cadence slowed
slightly:
no release shipped in October, and 1.9.0 is being finalized now.
Issues for the board: There are no issues requiring the board's attention at
this time.
## Membership Data:
Apache Polaris was founded 2026-02-18 (8 months ago)
There are currently 33 committers and 19 PMC members in this project.
The Committer-to-PMC ratio is roughly 7:4.
Community changes, past quarter:
- No new PMC members. Last addition was Sung Yun on 2026-04-27.
- Ayush Saxena was added as committer on 2026-10-12
## Project Activity:
Releases this quarter:
- 1.8.0 released 2026-09-28
- Iceberg Catalog Migrator 1.1.0 (polaris-tools) released 2026-09-28
- 1.7.0 released 2026-08-02
1.9.0 was proposed for the end of October and is now being finalized. Its
planned scope includes a first beta of Polaris Directories.
Development activity on GitHub (apache/polaris), August-October 2026:
- Pull requests: 646 opened, 529 merged (391 and 294 when excluding
automated dependency updates)
- Issues: 84 opened, 53 closed
- Currently open: 137 pull requests, 286 issues
The companion repository apache/polaris-tools had 28 pull requests opened
and
19 merged over the same period.
Highlights of the 1.7.0 and 1.8.0 releases:
- New event listeners that publish Polaris events to Kafka and as
OpenTelemetry log records, for audit and observability.
- GCS principal attribution for vended credentials, so the Polaris principal
appears in Google Cloud audit logs (the GCP counterpart of AWS STS session
tags).
- More control over table locations: optional unique managed locations, and
an option to reject client-specified locations.
- Dedicated privileges for semantic models.
- Configurable database schema for the relational JDBC backend, Helm chart
support for maintenance jobs, and several Python CLI improvements.
Security: two CVEs were published this quarter, following the ASF security
process. Both were fixed in a release before being publicly disclosed:
- CVE-2026-64640 (low), fixed in 1.7.0
- CVE-2026-97395 (important), fixed in 1.8.0
Design discussions active on the dev list this quarter:
- Open Sharing: APIs for sharing catalog objects with external recipients,
following up on last quarter's Data Sharing proposal, now moving into a
design and prototyping phase.
- Tags and labels: a Polaris Tag specification, and how it should map to the
"labels" field recently added to the Iceberg REST catalog specification.
- Polaris Directories: an updated proposal for tracking objects, including
unstructured data, in the catalog, with a call for review on the dev list.
- Persistence and transactions: an optional DynamoDB backend, consistent
multi-object changes, multi-table/multi-statement transactions, and
catalog-level branches for atomic multi-table promotion.
- Storage: Cloudflare R2 support with scoped credential vending (raised by
an
end user), plus several threads on credential vending behavior.
A new repository, apache/terraform-provider-polaris, was created in August
to
host a Terraform provider for Polaris. Work there is at an early stage.
Release votes, design discussions and decisions continue to take place on
the
public dev@ list in accordance with the Apache Way.
## Community Health:
Community health is good, with review capacity as the main area to watch.
Contributor growth is strong: 76 distinct people opened pull requests
against
apache/polaris this quarter (up from 57 in the previous quarter), and 42 of
them opened their first pull request to the project. The project added one
new committer (Ayush Saxena). The committer and PMC rolls remain diverse
across employers and independent contributors, which keeps the project
vendor-neutral.
The dev list carried 743 messages in 118 threads from 64 participants, down
from 1,026 messages last quarter, partly reflecting the summer holidays.
Design
threads remained substantive, and newcomers started threads of their own,
for example a thread on multi-table transactions that followed a talk at
Lakehouse Day EU.
The growth in contributions, helped in part by AI coding tools, has made
review the bottleneck. The community is addressing this openly on the dev
list:
- A PMC member started a discussion on giving sustained, high-quality
review more weight when considering committer candidates.
- Contributors using AI tools were asked to review their own changes first
and to keep pull requests small and focused.
- An opt-in trial of an AI review bot started in October. It only posts
comments, is clearly labeled as AI-generated, and never approves or
merges; committers remain responsible for merge decisions.
- A thread discussed aligning the project's AI-disclosure guidance with the
current ASF Generative Tooling guidance.
The bi-weekly community sync continued, with recordings and notes shared on
the dev list. Community events this quarter:
- Polaris Bay Area Meetup, 2026-09-30, Menlo Park, CA
- Lakehouse Day EU 2026, 2026-10-10, Glasgow, co-located with Community Over
Code, with Polaris among the featured projects
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Please let me know if you have any comments or changes.
I will send the report by the end of the week.
Thanks!
Regards
JB
