Chapter 6: Exploring Delta Lake in Azure Databricks

Delta Lake is an open source storage layer that sits on a cloud object store such as Azure Data Lake Storage. Recently, many organizations have opted for data lake for their big data solution as they can keep all the data (batch and streaming data) in one location and later use it for various analytics and machine learning work. The main challenges with a data lake is that there is no schema enforcement, it does not guarantee consistency of the data, and does not provide Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) transactions. To overcome these challenges, Databricks has introduced Delta Lake. Delta Lake provides a lot of key benefits including ACID transactions, schema enforcements, schema evolution, update/delete operations on the data in the Delta Lake, and metadata handling.

By the end of this chapter, you will get to know how you can use Delta Lake and adopt Lakehouse patterns in your big data projects.

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