Changelog

Billing is now enabled for R2 Data Catalog on non-enterprise accounts. R2 Data Catalog usage beyond the included free tier will appear on your next invoice.

R2 Data Catalog charges based on two dimensions, in addition to standard R2 storage and operations:

• Catalog operations: $9.00 / million operations for metadata requests such as creating tables, reading table metadata, and updating table properties.
• Compaction: $0.005 / GB processed and $2.00 / million objects processed. These charges only apply when automatic compaction is turned on for a table.

Each dimension includes a monthly free tier: 1 million catalog operations, 10 GB of compaction data processed, and 1 million compaction objects processed.

For example, a single Iceberg table with 50 GB of data, 500,000 catalog operations per month, and compaction turned on that processes 20 GB across 200,000 files would be billed as follows:

Standard R2 storage charges ($0.015 / GB-month) apply separately for the 50 GB of data stored.

For full pricing details and billing examples, refer to R2 Data Catalog pricing.

R2 Data Catalog now accepts read-only API tokens, so query engines and clients that only read data no longer need a read-write token. Previously, every catalog operation required an Admin Read & Write token, which granted read-only clients more access than they needed.

You can now authenticate your Iceberg engine based on your workload:

• Read-only operations (such as listing namespaces, loading tables, and querying data) work with an Admin Read only token (R2 Data Catalog read and R2 storage read).
• Write operations (such as creating or dropping tables and committing transactions) continue to require an Admin Read & Write token.

This lets you follow the principle of least privilege — for example, using a read-write token for the pipeline that writes to your tables and read-only tokens for engines like R2 SQL, DuckDB, or PyIceberg that query them.

Note that credentials vended by the catalog inherit the R2 storage permissions of the token used to authenticate. To ensure read-only access to your underlying data, scope the R2 storage permission to read-only as well.

For details on choosing and creating the right token, refer to Authenticate your Iceberg engine.

R2 Data Catalog, a managed Apache Iceberg ↗ catalog built into R2, now automatically optimizes manifest files as part of compaction.

Manifest files track the data files that make up an Iceberg table. As a table accumulates many small or fragmented manifests, query engines must read more metadata during query planning, which slows down queries even before any data is scanned.

When compaction runs, R2 Data Catalog now rewrites and clusters manifest files by partition as a best-effort pre-step. This consolidates fragmented manifests, reduces the number of manifests a query engine must open, and lowers metadata I/O overhead. Tables that are already well-clustered are skipped, so the operation only runs when it provides a benefit.

This happens automatically for tables with compaction enabled — no configuration changes are required.

For more information, refer to Table maintenance.

R2 Data Catalog is a managed Apache Iceberg ↗ catalog built directly into your R2 bucket. Iceberg tracks your data through a tree of metadata files, so every insert, update, and delete must go through a catalog transaction. Manually adding, modifying, or deleting objects outside the catalog can leave pointers referencing files that no longer exist, corrupting the table into an inconsistent state that is difficult to recover from.

To help prevent this, the R2 dashboard and Wrangler now warn you when you attempt a manual delete operation on a Data Catalog-enabled bucket.

When you try to delete objects from a bucket that has R2 Data Catalog enabled, the dashboard displays a warning explaining that the operation could leave the catalog in an invalid state, with a link to the documentation for deleting data correctly. You can cancel the operation or choose to proceed anyway.

Wrangler now checks whether a bucket is Data Catalog-enabled before running a delete and warns you before continuing:

Data Catalog is enabled for this bucket. 
Proceeding may leave the data catalog in an invalid state. Continue?

To learn how to safely manage and delete data in your tables, refer to the R2 Data Catalog documentation.

R2 Data Catalog is a managed Apache Iceberg ↗ data catalog built directly into R2 buckets, queryable by any Iceberg-compatible engine such as Spark, Snowflake, and DuckDB. R2 Data Catalog now has published pricing for catalog operations and table compaction, in addition to standard R2 storage and operations.

Billing is not yet enabled. We will provide at least 30 days notice before we start charging for R2 Data Catalog usage.

Pricing is based on two dimensions:

• Catalog operations: $9.00 / million operations for metadata requests such as creating tables, reading table metadata, and updating table properties.
• Compaction: $0.005 / GB processed and $2.00 / million objects processed. These charges only apply when automatic compaction is turned on for a table.

Both dimensions include a monthly free tier: 1 million catalog operations, 10 GB of compaction data processed, and 1 million compaction objects processed.

For full pricing details and billing examples, refer to R2 Data Catalog pricing.

R2 Data Catalog is a managed Apache Iceberg ↗ data catalog built directly into your R2 bucket. It exposes a standard Iceberg REST catalog interface so you can connect query engines like Spark, Snowflake, DuckDB, and R2 SQL to your data in R2.

R2 Data Catalog now has a dedicated section in the Cloudflare dashboard, replacing the previous settings panel embedded in R2 bucket configuration. The new experience includes:

• Catalog overview — View all your catalogs in one place with catalog request counts, bucket sizes, and table maintenance status at a glance.
• Guided setup wizard — Create a catalog in three steps: choose or create an R2 bucket, configure table maintenance (compaction and snapshot expiration), and review. The wizard creates the bucket and generates a service credential automatically.
• Settings management — A dedicated settings page for each catalog with sections for general configuration, table maintenance, service credentials, and disabling the catalog. You can now enable and configure snapshot expiration directly from the dashboard.
• Built-in metrics — Five charts on each catalog's metrics tab: bytes compacted, files compacted, catalog requests, storage size, and snapshots expired.

To get started, go to R2 Data Catalog in the Cloudflare dashboard or refer to the getting started guide and manage catalogs documentation.

R2 Data Catalog is a managed Apache Iceberg data catalog built directly into your R2 bucket that allows you to connect query engines like R2 SQL, Spark, Snowflake, and DuckDB to your data in R2.

You can now query analytics for your R2 Data Catalog warehouses via Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API. Two new datasets are available:

• r2CatalogDataOperationsAdaptiveGroups tracks Iceberg REST API requests made to your catalog, including operation type, request duration, HTTP status, and request body bytes. Use this to monitor request volume and latency across warehouses, namespaces, and tables.
• r2CatalogTableMaintenanceAdaptiveGroups tracks table maintenance jobs such as compaction and snapshot expiration. Use this to monitor job success rates, files processed, bytes read and written, and job duration.

Both datasets support filtering by warehouse name, namespace, table name, and time range. They also include percentile aggregations for duration metrics.

For detailed schema information and example queries, refer to the R2 Data Catalog metrics and analytics documentation.

R2 Data Catalog, a managed Apache Iceberg ↗ catalog built into R2, now removes unreferenced data files during automatic snapshot expiration. This improvement reduces storage costs and eliminates the need to run manual maintenance jobs to reclaim space from deleted data.

Previously, snapshot expiration only cleaned up Iceberg metadata files such as manifests and manifest lists. Data files that were no longer referenced by active snapshots remained in R2 storage until you manually ran remove_orphan_files or expire_snapshots through an engine like Spark. This required extra operational overhead and left stale data files consuming storage.

Snapshot expiration now handles both metadata and data file cleanup automatically. When a snapshot is expired, any data files that are no longer referenced by retained snapshots are removed from R2 storage.

# Enable catalog-level snapshot expiration
npx wrangler r2 bucket catalog snapshot-expiration enable my-bucket \
  --older-than-days 7 \
  --retain-last 10

For more information, refer to the table maintenance documentation.

R2 Data Catalog now supports automatic snapshot expiration for Apache Iceberg tables.

In Apache Iceberg, a snapshot is metadata that represents the state of a table at a given point in time. Every mutation creates a new snapshot which enable powerful features like time travel queries and rollback capabilities but will accumulate over time.

Without regular cleanup, these accumulated snapshots can lead to:

• Metadata overhead
• Slower table operations
• Increased storage costs.

Snapshot expiration in R2 Data Catalog automatically removes old table snapshots based on your configured retention policy, improving performance and storage costs.

# Enable catalog-level snapshot expiration
# Expire snapshots older than 7 days, always retain at least 10 recent snapshots
npx wrangler r2 bucket catalog snapshot-expiration enable my-bucket \
  --older-than-days 7 \
  --retain-last 10

Snapshot expiration uses two parameters to determine which snapshots to remove:

• --older-than-days: age threshold in days
• --retain-last: minimum snapshot count to retain

Both conditions must be met before a snapshot is expired, ensuring you always retain recent snapshots even if they exceed the age threshold.

This feature complements automatic compaction, which optimizes query performance by combining small data files into larger ones. Together, these automatic maintenance operations keep your Iceberg tables performant and cost-efficient without manual intervention.

For more information, refer to Table maintenance or Manage catalogs.

You can now enable compaction for individual Apache Iceberg ↗ tables in R2 Data Catalog, giving you fine-grained control over different workloads.

# Enable compaction for a specific table (no token required)
npx wrangler r2 bucket catalog compaction enable <BUCKET> <NAMESPACE> <TABLE> --target-size 256

This allows you to:

• Apply different target file sizes per table
• Disable compaction for specific tables
• Optimize based on table-specific access patterns

Learn more at Manage catalogs.

You can now enable automatic compaction for Apache Iceberg ↗ tables in R2 Data Catalog to improve query performance.

Compaction is the process of taking a group of small files and combining them into fewer larger files. This is an important maintenance operation as it helps ensure that query performance remains consistent by reducing the number of files that needs to be scanned.

To enable automatic compaction in R2 Data Catalog, find it under R2 Data Catalog in your R2 bucket settings in the dashboard.

Or with Wrangler, run:

npx wrangler r2 bucket catalog compaction enable <BUCKET_NAME>  --target-size 128 --token <API_TOKEN>

To get started with compaction, check out manage catalogs. For best practices and limitations, refer to about compaction.

Today, we are launching R2 Data Catalog in open beta, a managed Apache Iceberg catalog built directly into your Cloudflare R2 bucket.

If you are not already familiar with it, Apache Iceberg ↗ is an open table format designed to handle large-scale analytics datasets stored in object storage, offering ACID transactions and schema evolution. R2 Data Catalog exposes a standard Iceberg REST catalog interface, so you can connect engines like Spark, Snowflake, and PyIceberg to start querying your tables using the tools you already know.

To enable a data catalog on your R2 bucket, find R2 Data Catalog in your buckets settings in the dashboard, or run:

npx wrangler r2 bucket catalog enable my-bucket

And that's it. You'll get a catalog URI and warehouse you can plug into your favorite Iceberg engines.

Visit our getting started guide for step-by-step instructions on enabling R2 Data Catalog, creating tables, and running your first queries.