Apache Polaris (incubating) 1.2 Released, Featuring Enhanced Governance, Connectivity and Usability

What to expect in version 1.2

Expanded enterprise governance and security

The newest release takes several important steps to provide users with more control and flexibility in securing their data environments.

• Finer-grained authorization for table updates: Instead of granting a broad privilege such as TABLE_WRITE_PROPERTIES, administrators can now grant privileges for specific, individual operations. For example, there are permissions just for creating a new snapshot (TABLE_ADD_SNAPSHOT) or adding a new partition spec. Existing broader privileges will continue to function as expected.
• Subcatalog role-based access control (RBAC) support for federated catalogs: Administrators can apply Polaris’s built-in RBAC model to externally managed tables and namespaces. This capability is controlled by the new catalog property polaris.config.enable-sub-catalog-rbac-for-federated-catalogs, making governance across heterogeneous environments much more streamlined.
• Principal credential reset: A new management API endpoint has been added to allow administrators to reset principal credentials. This functionality is controlled by the ENABLE_CREDENTIAL_RESET feature flag (default: true).

Enhanced connectivity and storage compatibility

Version 1.2 also brings a lot of improvements that widen the scope of the environments Polaris can connect to and manage.

• Amazon RDS IAM authentication: With the enablement of a new Amazon RDS, users have the ability to connect Polaris to AWS Aurora PostgreSQL using IAM authentication, simplifying the management of database credentials.
• Wider S3-compatible storage: Polaris also now supports S3-compatible storage that does not require AWS Security Token Service (STS). By setting stsUavailable: true in your catalog storage configuration, you can more easily integrate and use self-hosted object stores, such as MinIO.

Management and usability improvements

The Polaris community has been working to enhance the developer experience and client usability.

• Improved management API responses: The following APIs will now return the newly created objects as part of the successful 201 response: createCatalog, createPrincipalRole and createCatalogRole. This change simplifies automation and client-side confirmation.
• Enhanced Python client: The Python client has received a significant update, bringing support for policy management and custom realm/header settings, making it easier for data engineers using Python to interact with and administer Polaris.
• Events persistence (in preview): The community has introduced new event types and added support for persisting events to both Relational JDBC Persistence and AWS CloudWatch. As this is a preview feature, the persistence schema is subject to change in future releases, and previously stored event data may become unreadable (i.e., dropped) after an upgrade.

Breaking changes and deprecations

As with any major release, there are a few notable changes and upcoming deprecations that users should be aware of when planning their upgrade.

With version 1.2, creating or altering a namespace with a custom location outside its parent location is now prohibited by default. To restore the old behavior, you can set the ALLOW_NAMESPACE_CUSTOM_LOCATION flag to true.

The following features are being deprecated and are scheduled for removal in future releases:

• The property polaris.active-roles-provider.type is deprecated and has no effect anymore.
• The EclipseLink Persistence implementation, deprecated since 1.0.0, will be completely removed in 1.3.0 or 2.0.0, whichever comes earlier.
• The legacy management endpoints at /metrics and /healthcheck have been deprecated in 1.2.0 and will also be removed in a subsequent release. Please switch to the new standard endpoints at /q/metrics and /q/health instead.

Get started today

With the arrival of Polaris 1.2, we encourage you to upgrade your instances, explore these new capabilities and join us in celebrating all the great work the Polaris community has accomplished.

Remember: New features are being implemented for Polaris at an exciting pace. We encourage you to download the latest version and give Polaris a try. Be sure to monitor the GitHub repository for new features and fixes and join the discussion — because the best time to get involved is now! 

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