Audience
Data engineers and backend developers needing a solution to run scalable analytics over large datasets stored in R2 using SQL
About R2 SQL
R2 SQL is Cloudflare’s serverless, distributed analytics query engine (currently in open beta) that enables you to run SQL queries over Apache Iceberg tables stored in R2 Data Catalog without needing to manage your own compute clusters. It is built to efficiently query large volumes of data by leveraging metadata pruning, partition-level statistics, file and row-group filtering, and Cloudflare’s globally distributed compute infrastructure to parallelize execution. The system works by integrating with R2 object storage and an Iceberg catalog layer, so you can ingest data via Cloudflare Pipelines into Iceberg tables, and then query that data with minimal overhead. Queries can be issued via the Wrangler CLI or HTTP API (with an API token granting permissions across R2 SQL, Data Catalog, and storage). During the open beta period, using R2 SQL itself is not billed, only storage and standard R2 operations incur charges.