Hi Steve, The public dataset is accessible from anywhere. BigLake offers a free tier with the first 50,000 requests being free each month [1]. While not entirely free, it's essentially "freeish." I'm uncertain about egress charges. When using the dataset, users must specify a project that will be billed. However, based on my personal experience with my project, I haven't incurred any charges. I know spinning up a Spark cluster is not a big deal for you, but if you want to give it a fast try, I also created a gist with pyiceberg [2].
[1] https://cloud.google.com/products/biglake/pricing [2] https://gist.github.com/talatuyarer/02568a38a7630434556e7dc1f0a5ab40 On Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 5:31 AM Steve Loughran <[email protected]> wrote: > > are these remotely accessible? and who pays? > > I'm just thinking of whether its an datasource for regression testing. > > For s3a we use public (free) parquet datasets for some of the scale read > testing...keeps setup time minimal and stops "needs a few hundred MB of > data in s3" as a cost blocker to contributors (*). > > It'd be nice to have public iceberg datasets in the various stores for > similar regression tests > > steve > > (*) we use NOAA data, luckily the s3 bucket hasn't been decommissioned by > the US govt, though I did worry about that last year > > On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 21:27, Alex Stephen via dev <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> We just launched a public dataset (backed by a public Iceberg REST >> Catalog) that can be accessed by any Iceberg-enabled query engine. The goal >> is for Iceberg developers to begin diving into the ecosystem without >> bootstrapping a full catalog and creating data. >> >> We'd love to hear any of your thoughts on how we can improve it. >> >> Announcement blog post >> <https://opensource.googleblog.com/2026/01/explore-public-datasets-with-apache-iceberg-and-biglake.html> >> Example PySpark script >> <https://gist.github.com/rambleraptor/7fd2fd55a208da7e5c000430d54d8db4> >> >> Thanks! >> >> -- Alex Stephen >> >
