Google Cloud Lakehouse for Apache Iceberg vs Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Google Cloud Lakehouse for Apache Iceberg is a web service for working with Apache Iceberg tables. Its listed capabilities include SQL analytics, ACID transactions, streaming ingestion, and a governance catalog, with both listed storage models and table-format categories supported. Charges are organized by metadata storage, table management, metadata access, and catalog federation refresh rather than a single stated plan price. Metadata storage includes 1 GiB free each month; additional storage starts at $0.04 per GiB per month. Table management starts at $0.12 per DCU-hour and includes storage optimization, adaptive file sizing, automatic clustering, garbage collection, and BigQuery metadata generation. Class A metadata access includes 5,000 free operations monthly, and Class B includes 50,000. Catalog federation metadata refresh lists 0 to 5,001 free operations per account each month. The service is paid overall and has no free plan, despite those component-level free allowances. Listed billing thresholds are above 5,001 operations for Class A and catalog refresh, and above 50,001 for Class B. Google was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Microsoft Fabric Notebooks is a web-based coding surface for Apache Spark jobs and machine learning experiments. Data engineers and data scientists can import Jupyter .ipynb files and source files in .py, .scala, and .sql formats, then analyze CSV, TXT, JSON, Parquet, and Delta Lake data with Spark. Multiple lakehouses can be attached, with one pinned as default for local-path reads and writes. The Job Scheduler API handles parameterized runs, session and environment settings, runtime and lakehouse selection, monitoring, and cancellation. NotebookUtils works across ADLS Gen2, Azure Blob Storage, and Lakehouse storage and can retrieve Azure Key Vault secrets. Users can co-edit, see cursors and output, and comment on cells. Copilot can generate, refactor, summarize, validate, and repair code with approval. Security includes Entra ID authentication, encryption, private links, customer-managed keys, and outbound protection.