Apache Hudi: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. What Is Apache Hudi?

No one opens a book on data platforms because they’re having an easy week at work.

That’s because building data platforms is not for the faint of heart; it’s often a matter of custom development and experimentation, requiring constant research into the rapidly evolving open source landscape and painstaking architectural tuning over periods of months or even years. We don’t embark on such journeys casually.

Interestingly, most people are blissfully unaware of the data platform at their organization. They only start discussing it when something has gone very wrong.

Our assumption is that you are reading this book because you are looking to improve how your organization works with data. Perhaps customers have begun complaining about seeing stale or inconsistent data. Or the legacy database that served you for a decade is buckling under the analytical query load or new machine learning features. Maybe your data warehouse has simply become too expensive to scale as data-driven workloads keep spiking.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, this book may be just what you need. In fact, if the preceding description resonates, it is probably because your organization needs a data lakehouse—a modern data platform that not only addresses these challenges but also unlocks new opportunities for faster insights, advanced analytics, and data-driven innovation at scale.

The lakehouse architecture is the current state of the art for orchestrating the efficient ...