very cool shit, it's certainly blurred the whole olap vs oltp thing a smidge but not quite. more or less makes olap and oltp available through the same db connection. writing back to iceberg is possible, we have a couple apps doing it. though one should probably batch/queue writes back as iceberg definitely doesnt have the fast-writes story. its just nice that the data warehouse analytics nerds have access to the apps data and they can do their thing in the environment they work with back on the snowflake side.
this is definitely an "i only get to play with these techs cause the company pays for it" thing. no one wants to front the cost of iceberg datalake sized mountains of data on some s3 storage somewhere, and it doesn't solve for any sort of native-postgres'ing. it just solves for companies that are doing ridic stuff under enormous sla contracts to pay for all manners of cloud services that joe developer the home guy isn't going to be tinkering with anytime soon. but definitely an interesting time to work near data, so much "sql" has been commercialized over the years and it's really great to see postgres being the peoples champ and helping us break away from the dumb attempts to lock us in under sql servers and informix dbs etc. but we still havent reached a one database for everything yet, but postgres is by and large the one carrying the torch though in my head cannon. if any of them will get there someday, it's postgres.
Also, I am working on https://github.com/viggy28/streambed to perform analytics queries on S3 using DuckDB