delta VS Apache Arrow

Compare delta vs Apache Arrow and see what are their differences.

delta

An open-source storage framework that enables building a Lakehouse architecture with compute engines including Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino, and Hive and APIs (by delta-io)

Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow is a multi-language toolbox for accelerated data interchange and in-memory processing (by apache)
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delta Apache Arrow
69 75
6,897 13,523
2.5% 2.5%
9.8 10.0
4 days ago 3 days ago
Scala C++
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

delta

Posts with mentions or reviews of delta. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-19.
  • Delta Lake vs. Parquet: A Comparison
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jan 2024
    Delta is pretty great, let's you do upserts into tables in DataBricks much easier than without it.

    I think the website is here: https://delta.io

  • Understanding Parquet, Iceberg and Data Lakehouses
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Dec 2023
    I often hear references to Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake as if they’re two peas in the Open Table Formats pod. Yet…

    Here’s the Apache Iceberg table format specification:

    https://iceberg.apache.org/spec/

    As they like to say in patent law, anyone “skilled in the art” of database systems could use this to build and query Iceberg tables without too much difficulty.

    This is nominally the Delta Lake equivalent:

    https://github.com/delta-io/delta/blob/master/PROTOCOL.md

    I defy anyone to even scope out what level of effort would be required to fully implement the current spec, let alone what would be involved in keeping up to date as this beast evolves.

    Frankly, the Delta Lake spec reads like a reverse engineering of whatever implementation tradeoffs Databricks is making as they race to build out a lakehouse for every Fortune 1000 company burned by Hadoop (which is to say, most of them).

    My point is that I’ve yet to be convinced that buying into Delta Lake is actually buying into an open ecosystem. Would appreciate any reassurance on this front!

  • Getting Started with Flink SQL, Apache Iceberg and DynamoDB Catalog
    4 projects | dev.to | 18 Dec 2023
    Apache Iceberg is one of the three types of lakehouse, the other two are Apache Hudi and Delta Lake.
  • [D] Is there other better data format for LLM to generate structured data?
    1 project | /r/MachineLearning | 10 Dec 2023
    The Apache Spark / Databricks community prefers Apache parquet or Linux Fundation's delta.io over json.
  • Delta vs Iceberg: make love not war
    1 project | /r/MicrosoftFabric | 30 Jun 2023
    Delta 3.0 extends an olive branch. https://github.com/delta-io/delta/releases/tag/v3.0.0rc1
  • Databricks Strikes $1.3B Deal for Generative AI Startup MosaicML
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2023
    Databricks provides Jupyter lab like notebooks for analysis and ETL pipelines using spark through pyspark, sparkql or scala. I think R is supported as well but it doesn't interop as well with their newer features as well as python and SQL do. It interfaces with cloud storage backend like S3 and offers some improvements to the parquet format of data querying that allows for updating, ordering and merged through https://delta.io . They integrate pretty seamlessly to other data visualisation tooling if you want to use it for that but their built in graphs are fine for most cases. They also have ML on rails type through menus and models if I recall but I typically don't use it for that. I've typically used it for ETL or ELT type workflows for data that's too big or isn't stored in a database.
  • The "Big Three's" Data Storage Offerings
    2 projects | /r/dataengineering | 15 Jun 2023
    Structured, Semi-structured and Unstructured can be stored in one single format, a lakehouse storage format like Delta, Iceberg or Hudi (assuming those don't require low-latency SLAs like subsecond).
  • Ideas/Suggestions around setting up a data pipeline from scratch
    3 projects | /r/dataengineering | 9 Jun 2023
    As the data source, what I have is a gRPC stream. I get data in protobuf encoded format from it. This is a fixed part in the overall system, there is no other way to extract the data. We plan to ingest this data in delta lake, but before we do that there are a few problems.
  • Medallion/lakehouse architecture data modelling
    1 project | /r/dataengineering | 3 Jun 2023
    Take a look at Delta Lake https://delta.io, it enables a lot of database-like actions on files
  • CSV or Parquet File Format
    3 projects | /r/Python | 1 Jun 2023
    I prefer parquet (or delta for larger datasets. CSV for very small datasets, or the ones that will be later used/edited in Excel or Googke sheets.

Apache Arrow

Posts with mentions or reviews of Apache Arrow. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-05.
  • How moving from Pandas to Polars made me write better code without writing better code
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2024
    In comes Polars: a brand new dataframe library, or how the author Ritchie Vink describes it... a query engine with a dataframe frontend. Polars is built on top of the Arrow memory format and is written in Rust, which is a modern performant and memory-safe systems programming language similar to C/C++.
  • From slow to SIMD: A Go optimization story
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jan 2024
    I learned yesterday about GoLang's assembler https://go.dev/doc/asm - after browsing how arrow is implemented for different languages (my experience is mainly C/C++) - https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/go/arrow/math - there are bunch of .S ("asm" files) and I'm still not able to comprehend how these work exactly (I guess it'll take more reading) - it seems very peculiar.

    The last time I've used inlined assembly was back in Turbo/Borland Pascal, then bit in Visual Studio (32-bit), until they got disabled. Then did very little gcc with their more strict specification (while the former you had to know how the ABI worked, the latter too - but it was specced out).

    Anyway - I wasn't expecting to find this in "Go" :) But I guess you can always start with .go code then produce assembly (-S) then optimize it, or find/hire someone to do it.

  • Time Series Analysis with Polars
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Dec 2023
    One is related to the heritage of being built around the NumPy library, which is great for processing numerical data, but becomes an issue as soon as the data is anything else. Pandas 2.0 has started to bring in Arrow, but it's not yet the standard (you have to opt-in and according to the developers it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future). Also, pandas's Arrow-based features are not yet entirely on par with its NumPy-based features. Polars was built around Arrow from the get go. This makes it very powerful when it comes to exchanging data with other languages and reducing the number of in-memory copying operations, thus leading to better performance.
  • TXR Lisp
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2023
    IMO a good first step would be to use the txr FFI to write a library for Apache arrow: https://arrow.apache.org/
  • 3D desktop Game Engine scriptable in Python
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Nov 2023
    https://www.reddit.com/r/O3DE/comments/rdvxhx/why_python/ :

    > Python is used for scripting the editor only, not in-game behaviors.

    > For implementing entity behaviors the only out of box ways are C++, ScriptCanvas (visual scripting) or Lua. Python is currently not available for implementing game logic.

    C++, Lua, and Python all implement CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) for remote function and method calls.

    "Using CFFI for embedding" https://cffi.readthedocs.io/en/latest/embedding.html :

    > You can use CFFI to generate C code which exports the API of your choice to any C application that wants to link with this C code. This API, which you define yourself, ends up as the API of a .so/.dll/.dylib library—or you can statically link it within a larger application.

    Apache Arrow already supports C, C++, Python, Rust, Go and has C GLib support Lua:

    https://github.com/apache/arrow/tree/main/c_glib/example/lua :

    > Arrow Lua example: All example codes use LGI to use Arrow GLib based bindings

    pyarrow.from_numpy_dtype:

  • Show HN: Udsv.js – A faster CSV parser in 5KB (min)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Sep 2023
  • Interacting with Amazon S3 using AWS Data Wrangler (awswrangler) SDK for Pandas: A Comprehensive Guide
    5 projects | dev.to | 20 Aug 2023
    AWS Data Wrangler is a Python library that simplifies the process of interacting with various AWS services, built on top of some useful data tools and open-source projects such as Pandas, Apache Arrow and Boto3. It offers streamlined functions to connect to, retrieve, transform, and load data from AWS services, with a strong focus on Amazon S3.
  • Cap'n Proto 1.0
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jul 2023
    Worker should really adopt Apache Arrow, which has a much bigger ecosystem.

    https://github.com/apache/arrow

  • C++ Jobs - Q3 2023
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 4 Jul 2023
    Apache Arrow
  • Wheel fails for pyarrow installation
    1 project | /r/learnpython | 16 Jun 2023
    I am aware of the fact that there are other posts about this issue but none of the ideas to solve it worked for me or sometimes none were found. The issue was discussed in the wheel git hub last December and seems to be solved but then it seems like I'm installing the wrong version? I simply used pip3 install pyarrow, is that wrong?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing delta and Apache Arrow you can also consider the following projects:

dvc - 🦉 ML Experiments and Data Management with Git

Airflow - Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows

Apache Cassandra - Mirror of Apache Cassandra

h5py - HDF5 for Python -- The h5py package is a Pythonic interface to the HDF5 binary data format.

lakeFS - lakeFS - Data version control for your data lake | Git for data

Apache Spark - Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing

hudi - Upserts, Deletes And Incremental Processing on Big Data.

FlatBuffers - FlatBuffers: Memory Efficient Serialization Library

delta-rs - A native Rust library for Delta Lake, with bindings into Python

polars - Dataframes powered by a multithreaded, vectorized query engine, written in Rust

iceberg - Apache Iceberg

ClickHouse - ClickHouse® is a free analytics DBMS for big data