Delta
Delta Lake
Judgement: Situational
Reach-For if you're on Databricks; Situational elsewhere.
Open-source storage layer that brings ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and time travel to data lakes. The original lakehouse format.
Delta Universal Format (UniForm) now also writes Iceberg-compatible metadata, narrowing the gap between the two formats.
Why it counts as a standard
The Delta transaction-log protocol is published as an open spec and implemented by readers and writers beyond Databricks — delta-rs, Trino, Flink, Spark. The standard surface is the protocol, not the Databricks runtime; that is what makes a Delta table portable across engines.
At a glance
- Category
- Open Table Formats
- Governance
- Linux Foundation (originally Databricks)
- Status
- Stable; widely deployed
- First released
- 2019
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Open Table Formats.
See Delta in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Delta against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.