Delta Lake: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. Introduction to the Delta Lake Lakehouse Format

This chapter explains Delta Lake’s origins and how it was initially designed to address data integrity issues around petabyte-scale systems. If you are familiar with Delta Lake’s history and instead want to dive into what Delta Lake is, its anatomy, and the Delta transaction protocol, feel free to jump ahead to the section “What Is Delta Lake?” later in this chapter.

The Genesis of Delta Lake

In this section, we’ll chart the course of Delta Lake’s short evolutionary history: its genesis and inspiration, and its adoption in the community as a lakehouse format, ensuring the integrity of every enterprise’s most important asset: its data. The Delta Lake lakehouse format was developed to address the limitations of traditional data lakes and data warehouses. It provides ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) transactions and scalable metadata handling and unifies various data analytics tasks, such as batch and streaming workloads, machine learning, and SQL, on a single platform.

Data Warehousing, Data Lakes, and Data Lakehouses

There have been many technological advancements in data systems (high-performance computing [HPC] and object databases, for example); a simplified overview of the advancements in querying and aggregating large amounts of business data systems over the last few decades would cover data warehousing, data lakes, and lakehouses. Overall, these systems address online analytics processing ...