Delta Lake: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Installing Delta Lake

In this chapter, we will show you how to set up Delta Lake and walk you through the simple steps to start writing your first standalone application.

There are multiple ways you can install Delta Lake. If you are just starting, using a single machine with the Delta Lake Docker image is the best option. If you want to skip the hassle of a local installation, the Databricks Community Edition, which includes the latest version of Delta Lake, is free. Various free trials of Databricks, which natively provides Delta Lake, are also available; check your cloud provider’s documentation for additional details. Other options discussed in this chapter include the Delta Rust Python bindings, the Delta Rust API, and Apache Spark. In this chapter, we also create and verify the Delta Lake tables for illustrative purposes. Delta Lake table creation and other CRUD operations are covered in depth in Chapter 3.

Delta Lake Docker Image

The Delta Lake Docker image contains all the necessary components to read and write with Delta Lake, including Python, Rust, PySpark, Apache Spark, and Jupyter Notebooks. The basic prerequisite is having Docker installed on your local machine (you can find installation instructions at Get Docker). Once you have Docker installed, you can either download the latest prebuilt version of the Delta Lake Docker image from DockerHub or build the Docker image yourself by following the instructions from the Delta Lake Docker GitHub repository ...