What is Delta Lake used for?

Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that adds ACID transactions to data lakes and supports lakehouse architectures with Spark, Flink, Trino and other engines. It is a good fit for building a lakehouse on object storage, reliable batch and streaming tables, and sharing table access across multiple engines.

Is Delta Lake open source?

Yes. Delta Lake is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at delta-io/delta and is written mainly in Scala.

Yes. Delta Lake is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Delta Lake?

Yes. Delta Lake can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What are some alternatives to Delta Lake?

Similar open-source tools in the Data Pipelines & ETL category include Apache Spark, Dremio OSS and Kafka. SaaS products in the same category include Databricks, Amazon EMR and Cloudera.

Is Delta Lake actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Delta Lake was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v4.4.0, published on 20 August 2026. The project has 9k stars on GitHub.

Delta Lake: open-source data pipelines & ETL

About Delta Lake

Delta Lake is an open-source storage framework for building a lakehouse architecture on top of data lake storage. It works with compute engines including Apache Spark, PrestoDB, Flink, Trino and Hive, and offers APIs for Scala, Java, Rust, Ruby and Python. Its topics reference ACID transactions, big data and analytics.

The repository documents a transaction protocol, requirements for the underlying storage systems and concurrency control, and ships a quick start for Scala, Java and Python. A set of integrations connects the format to other tools: Spark can read and write Delta tables, Flink can write to them, PrestoDB and Hive can read them, Trino can read and write, Delta Standalone serves JVM projects and the Delta Rust API gives low-level access to tables with Python and Ruby bindings.

This repository is one of several in the Delta Lake organization, alongside delta-rs, delta-sharing and kafka-delta-ingest. The code is written in Scala and licensed under Apache-2.0. It is used by data engineering teams that want reliable tables on object storage, and it is a library and format rather than a hosted product.

Key features

ACID transactions on data lake storage
Works with Spark, Flink, Trino and Hive
APIs for Scala, Java, Rust, Ruby and Python
Open transaction protocol specification
Delta Standalone for JVM projects
Delta Rust API with Python bindings

Good fit for

→Building a lakehouse on object storage
→Reliable batch and streaming tables
→Sharing table access across multiple engines

Built with: Scala
Tags: lakehouse; data-lake; acid; spark; big-data; analytics; delta-lake; scala; storage-format

Delta Lake: questions and answers

What is Delta Lake used for?: Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that adds ACID transactions to data lakes and supports lakehouse architectures with Spark, Flink, Trino and other engines. It is a good fit for building a lakehouse on object storage, reliable batch and streaming tables, and sharing table access across multiple engines.
Is Delta Lake open source?: Yes. Delta Lake is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at delta-io/delta and is written mainly in Scala.
Is Delta Lake free?: Yes. Delta Lake is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Delta Lake?: Yes. Delta Lake can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What are some alternatives to Delta Lake?: Similar open-source tools in the Data Pipelines & ETL category include Apache Spark, Dremio OSS and Kafka. SaaS products in the same category include Databricks, Amazon EMR and Cloudera.
Is Delta Lake actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Delta Lake was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v4.4.0, published on 20 August 2026. The project has 9k stars on GitHub.