Delta Sharing
Delta Sharing Protocol
Judgement: Situational
Cross-org sharing without copies; well-defined niche.
Open REST protocol for sharing tabular datasets across organisations and platforms without copying data. A recipient gets short-lived signed URLs to read Parquet/Delta files directly from the provider's object store.
Implemented by Databricks, plus open-source servers and clients in Python, Spark, Pandas, and Power BI. Sits next to FTP and HTTP as a modern, table-aware option for cross-organisation data exchange.
Why it counts as a standard
Delta Sharing is published as an open REST protocol specification under the Linux Foundation, with reference servers and clients across multiple languages and several independent implementations (Databricks, AWS, Azure, Power BI). The wire protocol is the standard surface — not the Databricks product.
At a glance
- Category
- Interconnection
- Governance
- Linux Foundation (donated by Databricks)
- Status
- Stable; multi-vendor adoption
- First released
- 2021
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Interconnection.
- HTTP — Hypertext Transfer Protocol
- FTP / SFTP — File Transfer Protocol / SSH File Transfer Protocol
See Delta Sharing in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Delta Sharing against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.