The history of open table formats over the past 15 years has been a whirlwind of innovation with no signs of stagnation. From the early days of Apache Hive, we’ve seen game-changing new formats such as Delta Lake, Iceberg and Hudi. These advancements highlight the critical nature of flexible and scalable open table formats in today’s data engineering ecosystem.
Today’s open table formats have clear widespread adoption, cost-effectiveness and empower data engineers to deliver valuable business insights rapidly.
While the “best” format can be (and will be) debated, all share critical functionalities that are crucial in building modern data lakes:
- ACID Transactions
- Schema Evolution
- First Class SQL Support
- Time Travel
- Rollback Support
Furthermore, features like Delta Universal Format are breaking down barriers between these formats, “so users don’t have to choose or do manual conversions between formats.” Thus, data management for data engineers is simplified.
Additionally, all of the open table formats leverage Parquet, “an open source, column-oriented data file format designed for efficient data storage and retrieval.” This shared foundation ensures each format is designed for querying and analytics.
Drivers for Adoption of Open Table Formats
A key driver to the widespread adoption of these formats is their cost-effectiveness for data analytics compared to alternatives. These cost savings stem from two primary factors:
- Leveraging cost-effective storage: Technologies like AWS S3 offer significant cost savings compared to alternatives such as block storage. For example, the cost of storing 1TB in S3 is $23 USD per month.
- Efficient Parquet format: Parquet’s columnar storage structure allows for high compression while optimizing for large-scale data retrieval.
But cost savings are just the tip of the iceberg. Open table formats’ true value is their ability to empower business-critical insights on massive datasets quickly and affordably.
These formats allow businesses the ability to answer questions such as:
- What product category drives the most sales across the company’s complete transaction history? Which could be in the billions.
- How do those sales break down across the different regions that we sell in across the world?
Open table formats make in-depth analysis of large-scale data a reality in minutes, not days. This allows businesses to unlock insights and make better data-driven decisions to drive company success. Remember, “Data is king, but you have to know how to use it.”
