With greater than 300% year-on-year utilization progress for two consecutive years, Delta Sharing is probably the most extensively adopted open protocol for Information and AI sharing. Main knowledge suppliers together with SAP, Walmart, Atlassian, and LSEG use Delta Sharing to share knowledge with their companions and clients throughout clouds and platforms. At the moment, we’re excited to announce that Databricks Delta Sharing has first-class help for the Apache Iceberg format.
Information suppliers can now share knowledge securely and reside from Databricks to any shopper that helps the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog API. Recipients on platforms similar to Snowflake, Trino, Flink, and Spark on all clouds can all use this functionality – including to Delta Sharing’s open ecosystem.
Moreover, we’re launching a Personal Preview that permits knowledge suppliers to make use of Delta Sharing to share Iceberg tables managed by catalogs outdoors Databricks – together with AWS Glue, Hive Metastore, Snowflake Horizon, and extra.
Collectively, you possibly can share any new or present tables (Delta or Iceberg, managed or international). This builds in direction of full open interoperability. You may herald Iceberg tables from any exterior catalog, handle them by Databricks and Unity Catalog, after which share them out to any recipient—whether or not they’re on Databricks, an Iceberg shopper, or a Delta shopper. This allows you to leverage Unity Catalog as your unified knowledge governance layer, providing you with one place for all sharing.
On this weblog put up, we’ll clarify why open knowledge sharing is necessary. We will even dive into how Delta Sharing to Iceberg shoppers work by a hands-on demo.
Why This Issues: Open vs. Closed Sharing
Most knowledge sharing options usually are not actually sharing—they’re trapping. They’re essentially closed and engineered to make sure vendor lock-in, so that you solely get to share with others who’re already inside their closed ecosystems. This limits your choices, stifles innovation, and drives huge, pointless knowledge replication.
Delta Sharing is probably the most extensively adopted open normal for safe knowledge sharing. Utilized by category-leading knowledge suppliers, it’s constructed to help completely different clouds and platforms. Delta Sharing operates on three core rules:
- Share any asset.
- Share with anybody.
- Share with none friction.
Including Iceberg shopper help strengthens this dedication. It permits you to share a Delta desk whereas recipients expertise it as a local Iceberg desk. Sharing occurs over the Iceberg REST API, so recipients can join from any Iceberg-compatible platform. This lets you get one of the best of each worlds: Information suppliers profit from superior Delta Sharing options similar to View sharing, whereas recipients obtain native Iceberg tables through the Iceberg REST API.
Recipients get safe, reside entry to the supply knowledge. This eliminates silos and allows you to share knowledge brazenly with anybody.
This function is right for organizations that have to share knowledge externally with companions and clients utilizing Iceberg shoppers, similar to these working on Snowflake or integrating with platforms like Trino, Flink, or Spark. Firms with a number of enterprise models working throughout a number of platforms additionally profit by unblocking seamless, bi-directional knowledge change in multi-cloud or hybrid environments. Industries already leveraging these patterns embody healthcare, retail, finance, ad-tech, and extra.
Interoperability: Each Supply and Vacation spot
As a result of we imagine in full open knowledge entry, we do not cease at sharing knowledge to Iceberg shoppers. We are actually creating the subsequent evolution: sharing international Iceberg tables that reside in exterior catalogs similar to AWS Glue or Snowflake Horizon. We’re excited to announce the Personal Preview of Delta Sharing help of international Iceberg tables.
You would possibly ask: Why share an Iceberg desk by Delta Sharing if it resides in AWS Glue or Snowflake? Why not share straight from inside that platform?
First, by cataloging your exterior Iceberg knowledge in Unity Catalog, you get a unified governance layer in Unity Catalog, permitting you to get full visibility and governance throughout your knowledge property. Moreover, utilizing Delta Sharing permits you to get the better of each worlds: You profit from Delta Sharing best-in-class sharing functionalities, whereas holding your knowledge in Iceberg format. This contains for instance, the flexibility to Delta Share Views for fine-grained entry management, which isn’t supported natively by the Iceberg IRC API.
With this Personal Preview, the Databricks Lakehouse is open in each instructions. Your Lakehouse can share knowledge to and obtain knowledge from the rising Iceberg ecosystem.
This twin skill provides you:
- Easy Collaboration: Work collectively regardless of which open desk format you employ (Delta or Iceberg).
- Ruled Sharing: Unity Catalog controls entry and offers audit logs.
- Broadest Attain: Share knowledge as each a supplier and a recipient, breaking platform partitions.
How Does It Work?
Think about your organization, Supplier Corp, makes use of Databricks and Delta Lake to handle buyer knowledge. It’s essential securely share a every day checklist of product gross sales with Associate Inc, which makes use of Snowflake and prefers the Iceberg format.
Earlier than this function: Supplier Corp must manually export the information, remodel it right into a Snowflake-readable format, add it to the associate’s cloud storage, and arrange a fancy synchronization job. That is sluggish, expensive, entails vital admin overhead, and dangers knowledge turning into outdated.
With Delta Sharing to Iceberg Shoppers:
- Supplier Corp permits Iceberg reads on gross sales knowledge through UniForm (this will embody managed and exterior Delta tables, views, materialized views, and streaming tables), and shares it through Delta Sharing. This offers reside entry with no duplication or re-ingestion required.
- Associate Inc units up a easy connection in Snowflake utilizing the supplied credentials for safe authentication through short-lived bearer tokens.
- Associate Inc’s analysts can instantly question the shared desk utilizing normal SQL, treating it like a local Iceberg desk of their Snowflake setting.
- The information they see is at all times reside (zero-copy), and Supplier Corp maintains full safety and governance with auditing and monitoring utilizing Unity Catalog.
This makes knowledge sharing immediate, protected, and fully format-agnostic.