Which data formats are supported by Delta Lake?

Delta Lake is designed to work with various data formats, making it highly versatile for data engineering tasks. It primarily leverages the Parquet format, which is a columnar storage format optimized for use with massive data processing frameworks. Additionally, Delta Lake supports other formats, including ORC, Avro, CSV, and JSON. This compatibility allows users to easily read from and write to Delta tables using data stored in these formats, facilitating data integration and transformation across diverse datasets.

This broad support for multiple formats is crucial because it allows organizations to utilize Delta Lake in a wide range of scenarios, whether they are ingesting streaming data, processing batch data, or integrating data from different sources. Consequently, it enhances the overall flexibility and efficiency of data storage and analytics processes. Other choices are limited in their scope, either by focusing on a narrow range of formats or specifying unsupported types.