Setting Up Arctic preview
Welcome to the Set Up guide for Dremio Arctic! In order to use Arctic, you need a Dremio Cloud account, also known as an organization. If you don’t already have a Dremio Cloud organization, see Signing up for Dremio Cloud.
To use Arctic during Preview, you need to create an Arctic catalog and connect it to a supported query engine. Arctic catalogs can be used with Dremio Sonar, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Apache Hive, and other engines.
What This Guide Covers
Step 1. Adding an Arctic Catalog
To create an Arctic catalog, you will need to access the New Arctic Catalog dialog box.
- If no catalogs exist, from the Organization page, selecting Add Arctic Catalog opens the New Arctic Catalog dialog box to enable you to create one.
- If catalogs already exist, selecting See all Arctic Catalogs navigates you to the Arctic catalogs home page. To add a catalog from this page, go to the upper-right of the page and select Add Catalog.
In the New Arctic Catalog dialog box:
Enter a Catalog Name.
Tip:
The name you enter must be unique in the organization. Also, consider a name that is easy for users to reference. This name cannot be edited once the catalog is created. The name cannot exceed 255 characters and must contain only the following: 0-9, A-Z, a-z, underscore(_), or hyphen (-).
Select Add.
After the catalog is created, you are taken to its main page, as shown in this image:

For more information about the catalog page, see Arctic Catalog.
Step 2. Connecting an Engine to Dremio Arctic
You can use Arctic with Dremio Sonar, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Apache Hive.
Select the engine that you want to connect to Arctic:
Learning More
After completing the set up steps, you are ready to use Arctic. To learn more about how to use and navigate the Arctic catalog page, see Quick Tour of the Arctic UI and Managing Catalogs. To learn about the available SQL commands for Arctic to manage your tables and views, as well as using commits, branches, and tags, see SQL Commands.
Limitations of Dremio Arctic Preview
- A table containing parallel changes on both source and destination branches cannot be merged. The workaround is to re-branch from the destination branch’s head reference point, reapply your changes to that table, and retry the merge. For more information about working with branches in Arctic, see SQL Commands.
- If the main branch is dropped in an Arctic catalog, the sources for that catalog will no longer be accessible.