What is a Delta Lake?

Delta Lake is an open-source data platform architecture that bridges the gap between data warehouses and data lakes by combining the cost-effective storage of data lakes with the management and performance features of data warehouses, forming what is known as a data lakehouse. Originally developed by Databricks as a proprietary system, Delta Lake became open source in 2019 and supports features such as ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel, enhancing its functionality over traditional data lakes. Its architecture utilizes the Delta Log to ensure data operations are ACID-compliant and maintain metadata integrity, allowing for database-like functionalities on cloud object storage. Delta Lake's open file formats and compatibility with systems like Apache Spark and Trino enable direct access for analytics and data science applications, providing scalability and preventing vendor lock-in. Recent advancements include support for schema evolution and time travel, making it a competitive solution in the big data analytics landscape, especially for organizations already integrated into the Databricks ecosystem.