Preview features in Cloudera Data Warehouse on cloud

Iceberg REST catalog support in Cloudera Data Warehouse Impala (Preview)

This feature introduces support for the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog, which allows Impala to connect directly to REST Catalog servers, such as Apache Polaris. This standardized HTTP API provides a lightweight, cloud-native approach to catalog management, enabling flexible deployment options like running Impala without dependency on Hive Metastore (HMS) or a catalogd, and supporting hybrid environments with multiple catalogs. This integration is supported in Impala 2025.0.21.0. As a technical preview, this feature currently supports the read path only.

For more information, see Impala Iceberg REST Catalog (Preview)

Impala supporting hive.sql.query for Hive JDBC tables (Preview)

You can now use the hive.sql.query table property to create Hive JDBC tables in Impala. This feature allows you to define external tables based on complex SQL queries including joins, filters, and aggregations rather than pointing only to a single physical table using hive.sql.table. hive.sql.query facilitates data virtualization by abstracting complex logic into a virtual table that Impala can consume securely.

Apache Jira: IMPALA-13869

For more information, see Using Impala to query external JDBC data sources (Preview).

Data Explorer SQL AI Assistant API

Previously, the SQL AI Assistant features in Data Explorer were accessible only through the Data Explorer user interface. You can now access the SQL AI Assistant through a RESTful API. This enhancement enables programmatic SQL operations, including sending natural language requests directly to the API endpoints.

For more information, see Data Explorer SQL AI Assistant API.