R2 Data Catalog Gets Its Own Dashboard!

Hey there, it's me, Shiichan! Today I found a treat for everyone working with data lakes. It's the story of how a certain R2 feature finally got its own proper home.

Cloudflare Changelog developers.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

The Cloudflare Changelog announced that R2 Data Catalog now has a dedicated dashboard section.

R2 Data Catalog lets you manage Apache Iceberg tables on top of R2, and you can read and write to them from engines like Spark, Snowflake, and DuckDB. This update makes managing it much nicer.

The story so far

Until now, the R2 Data Catalog settings lived as a small panel embedded inside the R2 bucket settings page. That made it a bit awkward to get a full picture of a catalog or to review all its settings in one place.

With this update, it graduates from that panel and moves into its own dedicated dashboard section.

What changes

The biggest win is being able to see your catalog's state at a glance. Catalog request counts, bucket sizes, and table maintenance status are all listed together, so "wait, what's the state of this right now?" becomes an easy check.

And when you create a new catalog, a guided wizard walks you through it, so it's friendlier even the first time.

Dive Deep

The new dashboard is built from four main parts:

• Catalog overview: shows request counts, bucket sizes, and table maintenance status together.
• Setup wizard: creates a catalog in three steps — pick (or create) an R2 bucket, configure table maintenance (compaction and snapshot expiration), then review. It also creates the bucket and generates service credentials for you automatically.
• Settings management: each catalog gets its own settings page where you can handle general config, table maintenance, service credentials, and disabling the catalog. You can now enable and configure snapshot expiration right from the dashboard.
• Metrics: five built-in charts — bytes compacted, files compacted, catalog requests, storage size, and snapshots expired.

If you want to try it hands-on, check out the getting started guide and the manage catalogs documentation. And by the way, pairing it with R2 SQL lets you run queries against your catalog tables too.

Wrap-up

• R2 Data Catalog moved from a panel inside bucket settings into its own dedicated dashboard.
• Four parts: an overview view, a three-step setup wizard, per-catalog settings pages, and five kinds of metrics.
• Being able to configure snapshot expiration straight from the dashboard is a quietly handy touch.

This update is perfect for anyone building a data lake on R2 or wanting a proper view of how their Iceberg tables are doing!