Understanding how Delta Lake enables the lakehouse

In Chapter 2, Discovering Storage and Compute Data Lake Architectures, we talked about the give-and-take struggle between traditional warehouse systems versus data lakes. In the last few years, many organizations have modernized their data engineering and analytics platforms by moving away from traditional data warehouses to data lakes. The move to the data lake has undoubtedly given them the flexibility to store and compute any format of data at a large scale. However, these advantages did not come without a few sacrifices along the way. The biggest one is the reliability of data. Like data warehouses, there is no transactional assurance available in a data lake. This need led to the launch of an open source storage layer known as Delta Lake.

After its launch, experts came up with the idea of mixing the power of resilient data warehouses with the flexibility of data lakes and they called it a lakehouse. The combined power of a...