delta-rs VS kafka-delta-ingest

I work at Databricks, but am pretty must just an OSS nerd, mainly focusing on Delta Rust recently: https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs

I did some keyword research and wrote this post cause lots of folks are doing searches for Delta Lake vs Parquet. I'm just trying to share a fair summary of the tradeoffs with folks who are doing this search. It's a popular post and that's why I figured I would share it here.

Seeing a lot of great libraries coming out with python bindings in the data world e.g delta-rs Polars. I see it growing in this space as a C++ alternative

If I’m not misunderstanding, you could both decode the gRPC protobuf AND write to delta lake in Rust. Tonic, Delta-rs.

https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs/issues/850 … looks like it’s on the roadmap!

Microsoft talk a lot about OneLake and that the delta file format will be the standard during the build conference. Is it only me that find it strange that their marketing team talks so much about the delta format when they do not even provide a library to work with the delta format from .net? It would be easy for them to maintain bindings to https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs but also provide a reader that support V-Order https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/delta-optimization-and-v-order?tabs=sparksql

I know someone will be adding this on the python side in the coming weeks. On the rust side you can use delta-rs with polars. Though you would be compiling both arrow2 and arrow-rs, so that's quite heavy.

You don’t need DBX to use Delta Lake. You can use S3 as the backend and just use the Python Delta Lake library. It works great! https://github.com/delta-io/delta-rs

Maybe if I get some free time soon I can formalize into a working example. Been wanting an excuse to try similar concept in delta-rs and polars/duckdb vs databricks/spark vs iceberg/polars.

delta-rs is a native Rust library for Delta Lake. It's a better way to store data than Parquet files and is fundamentally important library for the Rust data ecosystem. It's tightly integrated with Polars and Datafusion and there is a lot of interesting Rust work to be done.

Rust can offer incredible cost savings when you can use it in place of spark to interact with your delta lake. One such project was kafka-delta-ingest. The developers were able to reduce the cost of running the pipeline by over 90%. However, most of this stuff is still very experimental and not ready for production but you will definitely be seeing more projects like this just based on how much money can be saved.

This independence from a catalog allows for path based reads and writes. This is handy when writing from Kafka directly to Delta Lake for the first layer of ingestion. You don’t need a catalog (or even Spark). https://github.com/delta-io/kafka-delta-ingest/tree/main/src

As far as I know no. You certainly could use events on a streaming ledger like Kafka or Redpanda and then store to delta with https://github.com/delta-io/kafka-delta-ingest and process them with all the gis goodness of spark. However, this is fairly complicated and much different from a simple postgis drop in replacement. There are specialized meaning faster and more efficient systems out there for specialized tasks such as geo fencing in real-time

kafka-delta-ingest is a good project to get streaming data into a Delta Lake. Here's a great talk on the topic.

What about https://github.com/delta-io/kafka-delta-ingest?