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watsonx.data News | A Technical Touchpoint April 2026

By BIJO ALEX THOMAS posted Mon April 20, 2026 04:10 AM

  

Welcome to your April Technical Touchpoint!

This month we are highlighting three new capabilities: Zero-copy access to third-party lakehouses for querying data across lakehouse platforms without moving it, the Table Optimizer for automatically maintaining Iceberg table performance, and the remote MCP Server enabling agents to query your lakehouse through natural language.

You’re invited to join our upcoming live webinar on Standardizing enterprise data infrastructure for AI initiatives, and to participate in a customer feedback program where you can share direct input with the watsonx.data product team on upcoming improvements.

You’ll also have the chance to join a live AMA with IBM experts to dig into real questions and practical tips. Alongside the session, you can explore the latest What’s New updates, documentation, and Community discussions to stay current with the platform’s evolution. 

Feature Highlight:

Zero-copy access to third-party lakehouses

Watsonx.data now allows you to query data directly from third-party lakehouse platforms without copying or moving it, using a zero-copy approach known as data federation. By leveraging Spark and Presto engines, you can access remote data while maintaining a single source of truth. It supports integrations such as Confluent Tableflow, with additional platforms also capable of being integrated. This capability reduces the need for complex ETL pipelines and helps lower storage costs by querying data where it resides.

For watsonx.data Premium users, the Table Optimizer service automatically enhances the performance of Iceberg tables by compacting small files, optimizing metadata, and reorganizing data layouts, which helps reduce query latency and lower storage costs.

Interacting with Data through an MCP Server

For watsonx.data as a Service customers, you can now use the IBM watsonx.data remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server to enable agents to interact with IBM watsonx.data lakehouse instances through natural language interfaces. The remote MCP server provides comprehensive access to lakehouse data and metadata, supporting data exploration, query execution (SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE), engine management, Spark application control, and data ingestion operations while ensuring data integrity through controlled access.

What's New

watsonx.data as a Service on IBM Cloud what's new - Release notes for watsonx.data.
watsonx.data on-prem what's new - Release notes for watsonx.data.
watsonx.data on-prem Premium what's new - Release notes for on-prem Premium.

Upcoming Webinar: Taming Enterprise AI Sprawl

Join our upcoming webinar: “Taming Enterprise AI Sprawl: Standardizing Data Infrastructure for AI Initiatives”. Discover how Unstructured and IBM have partnered to help CIOs regain control from AI project sprawl. Learn how Unstructured’s trusted ingestion and document transformation combined with IBM watsonx.data and watsonx Orchestrate enables enterprises to centralize AI foundations, reduce TCO, and scale RAG and agentic use cases across teams.

Tuesday 21st April 2026.

Register here

Ask Me Anything 

Join us on May 5th, from 10:00am - 10:30pm EDT / 4:00pm - 4:30am CET and bring the conversations you really want to have, your questions, your stories, and the smart tips you’ve picked up along the way. It’s a chance to connect directly with IBM experts and fellow users, spark new ideas, and learn from real experiences. 

Register here

Help shape the future of watsonx.data

The watsonx.data product team is inviting customers to share quick feedback on upcoming improvements. Topics include: the Lakehouse AI assistant (what AI help would be most useful), a navigation menu redesign to make it easier to navigate the platform, and other improvements covering data ingestion, engine setup (Spark, Presto, OpenSearch), admin console consolidation, and integrations such as watsonx.BI, AstraDB, Cassandra, and VS Code.

Sign up to share your feedback here

Thank you for your continued engagement — your voice truly makes a difference!

Let us know which new feature are you exploring first?  What use case would you like to see highlighted in the next Touchpoint?

#watsonx.data

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