The Guide to Open Table Formats: Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, Paimon, and DuckLake
16 hours ago
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- Open table formats like Iceberg, Delta Lake, Hudi, Paimon, and DuckLake transform data lakes into reliable, ACID-compliant lakehouses.
- Key features include ACID transactions, schema evolution, time travel, efficient query planning, and multi-engine interoperability.
- Apache Iceberg is engine-agnostic, snapshot-driven, and widely adopted for large-scale analytics.
- Delta Lake, deeply integrated with Spark/Databricks, excels in batch/stream unification and transaction logging.
- Apache Hudi specializes in upserts, deletes, and incremental processing, ideal for CDC and near real-time use cases.
- Apache Paimon is streaming-first with an LSM-like design, optimized for high-velocity updates and real-time analytics.
- DuckLake simplifies metadata management by storing it in a relational database, enabling SQL-native operations.
- Industry trends show Iceberg as the default standard, Delta Lake strong in Spark ecosystems, Hudi in CDC, Paimon in streaming, and DuckLake in metadata simplification.
- Choosing the right format depends on workloads, ecosystem, and priorities like batch vs. streaming or simplicity vs. interoperability.