Working with the Delta Lake and Iceberg communities at Databricks to provide format compatibility to Lakehouse.

Data and AI company Databricks announced on the 10th that it has agreed to acquire data management company Tabular. Tabula was founded by Ryan Blue, Daniel Weeks, and Jason Reid, the creators of Apache Iceberg™.

Databricks said, “This acquisition leverages synergies between the creators of two leading open source lakehouse formats, Apache Iceberg™ and Linux Foundation Delta Lake, and leads the way in data interoperability, ensuring organizations are no longer limited by the format of their data.”

Databricks envisions that collaboration with the Delta Lake and Iceberg communities will take place within Delta Lake Uniform in the short term, and evolve into a single, open, common interoperability standard in the long term.

Databricks leverages open data to integrate traditional data warehousing workloads and AI workloads into a single, manageable copy of data, based on a lakehouse architecture. Lakehouse architecture maximizes enterprise productivity by democratizing access to data. Four years after breaking free from proprietary data warehouse dependencies, approximately 74% of enterprises worldwide have implemented a lakehouse architecture.

The foundation of Lakehouse is an open source data format that supports ACID transactions for data stored in object storage. This format is specifically designed for open source engines such as Apache Spark™, Trino, and Presto, and dramatically improves the reliability and performance of data operations in data lakes. To support this, Databricks has collaborated with the Linux Foundation to launch the Delta Lake project.

Delta Lake and Iceberg have since emerged as two major open source standards for lakehouse formats, but the two formats were developed independently and are not compatible. The two companies plan to work closely with the Delta Lake and Iceberg communities to provide interoperability as enterprises demand data interoperability to realize the benefits of lakehouse.

“Databricks and Tabular plan to work with the open source community to bring the two formats closer together over time, increasing openness and reducing customer silos and friction,” said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks co-founder and CEO. “Last year, we announced Delta Lake Uniform to provide interoperability between these two formats. We are excited to bring together the leaders in open data lakehouse formats to provide the best way to unify data for any workload with Uniform.”

Ryan Blue, Co-Founder and CEO of Tabula, said: “We built Apache Iceberg to solve critical data problems around accuracy, performance and scalability. As open lakehouses become the industry standard, the popularity of Iceberg and Delta Lake has grown significantly. Tabula joins Databricks to build the best-in-class data management platform based on the open lakehouse format, addressing enterprises’ concerns about choosing the ‘right’ format and avoiding lock-in to proprietary data formats.”