We have been witnessing rapid growth of data-
intensive applications adopting efficient columnar storage
formats, with Parquet becoming a widely used standard in
modern data pipeline. Parquet has been efficient than traditional
databases in the aspect of columnar storage, evolution of schema, efficient compression, and vast range of supported tools.
Parquet still had issues of capturing transactional logs and didn’t
support ACID properties or atomic writes, which resulted in
data corruption and metadata operations became expensive.
Delta Lake, an open-source storage layer built on Parquet,
addresses these limitations by introducing ACID transactions,
schema evolution, time travel, and unified batch and streaming
support. The study conducted on evaluating effectiveness of
Delta Lake over Apache Parquet helps to gather and take
advantage of the key benefits that delta lake provides in the
world of big data and the optimization techniques used in
Microsoft fabric as the baseline with delta lake being the
backend storage bin. With the extensive increase of data driven
critical applications in the IT sector, the columnar storage
orientated data formats such as Apache parquet has become the
industry standard in the big data world. Though parquet can
compress and store different data formats like Json, xml, audio,
csv, etc but it lacks the ACID properties that delta lake offers.
Parquet formats offer high data compression efficiency and
rapid query execution on the other hand lacks schema
enforcement, reliability, and transaction guarantees which is
crucial in this modern world. In short Delta Lake, an extension
of parquet is an open-source storage layer introduced on top of
parquet with delta logs that store incremental transaction logs
helps to eliminate the limitations of parquet by adding ACID
transactions, schema evolution, time travel and unified batch
streaming support. This research inquires that parquet offsets to
read low optimal workloads (does not support parallel operations and require batch processing) while delta lake provides remarkable advantages for heavy workloads that require data versioning, reliability, and parallel execution.