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Data WarehousingCloud

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Prerequisites

Before starting this Quickstart, you should have: To successfully follow this guide, you’ll need the following:
  • Access to an Iceberg-compatible data lake
  • Data Lake Catalog (URL + credentials)
  • Depending type of data lake catalog: Object storage credentials (for example, S3-compatible storage)
  • At least one existing Iceberg table registered in the catalog
If you do not have data already in your Iceberg catalog, you can upload this dataset. We will be demonstrating with the dataset here.

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What you’ll build

In this Quickstart, you will:
  • Connect to a Iceberg REST Catalog in ClickHouse Cloud
  • Create a ClickHouse database backed by that catalog
  • Query an existing Iceberg table directly from ClickHouse
  • Verify that ClickHouse is reading data from your data lake
By the end, you’ll have ClickHouse Cloud connected to your Iceberg catalog and be able to run SQL queries against Iceberg tables without copying data.
1

Create a DataLakeCatalog connection

In this step, you will connect to your Data Lake Catalog in ClickHouse Cloud.
  1. Open your ClickHouse Cloud service.
  2. Navigate to Data Sources → Connect to your Data Lake Catalog.
  3. Select your data catalog in dropdown.
  4. Fill out the form with your credential and connection information. For Unity Catalog, enter in:
    • Open Table Format (Iceberg)
    • ClickHouse Database name. This will be the name of your ClickHouse database you will query your iceberg tables from.
    • Workspace ID
    • Databricks catalog name
    • Client ID
    • Client Secret
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  5. Save the catalog. You should now see the Data Catalog load into your Data Sources page with the number of tables available on the database.
2

Query Iceberg Table

In this step, you will query an Iceberg table from your Data Catalog.
  1. Either by clicking Show Tables or SQL Console, you will land in the SQL console with your new database connected to your data lake materialized. If you go via SQL Console, change the database dropdown to your Iceberg database.
  2. You should see one or more Iceberg tables listed in your filetree. Run this query:
  1. ClickHouse will return the rows from your Iceberg table.

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Next steps

Now that you have connected to your data lake, you can test out writing an Iceberg table in ClickHouse.
Be mindful of your quotes. ClickHouse doesn’t support three part namespaces, you must quote your schema.table.
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All quickstarts
Last modified on September 1, 2026