Navigating Databricks’ Delta Lake Features and Type Widening

In the world of data management, Databricks’ Delta Lake benefits emerge as a game-changer. Initially designed as a data integrity solution for challenges within petabyte-scale systems, it has now become the most popular choice for organizations of all sizes as it evolves. From startups to large enterprises, Delta Lake helps manage big data and AI workloads better than ever before.

Certain challenges faced in data lakes were solved by the innovative concept of introducing a storage framework. Without the proper tools in place, data lakes can suffer from reliability issues that make it difficult for data scientists and analysts to reason about the data. Data lakes can hold millions of files and tables, so it’s important that your data lake query engine is optimized for performance at scale.

However, data lakes face performance issues like unnecessary disk reads and undeleted files hanging around to create unnecessary overhead. Traditional data lakes are difficult to secure and often fail to meet governance standards.

Enter ‘Delta Lake’—Databricks’ powerful open-source storage framework.

Introduction to Delta Lake: Databricks’ Powerful Data Lakehouse

According to the O’Reilly Delta Lake Definitive Guide, a Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that enhances your data lake with reliability, security, and performance, catering to both streaming and batch operations. 

Imagine transforming your data lake into a powerful lakehouse, with cloud storage integration using leading platforms like AWS’ Amazon S3 (S3), Microsoft’s Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Google Cloud Storage (GCS), Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and more.

With this outlook, let’s explore how Delta Lake use cases can level up your data strategy in this article.

Understanding the Features of Delta Lake

Delta Lake’s transformational storage framework enhances the capabilities of data lakes with its solution for managing large volumes of data efficiently. Built on top of existing data lakes, a Delta Lake introduces a suite of powerful features designed to tackle common challenges such as data reliability, performance optimization, and governance.

By integrating concepts like Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) transactions, schema enforcement, and Time Travel in Delta Lake, it transforms how enterprises handle and analyze their data.

Let’s explore the key features of Delta Lake that make it an essential tool for modern data management and analytics, enabling businesses to drive new-age analytics better.

Delta Lake is packed with features designed to streamline your data processes:

• ACID Transactions on Spark: Ensures data consistency with serializable isolation levels, so you never have to worry about inconsistent data.
• Scalable Metadata Handling: Harnesses Spark’s distributed processing to manage metadata for massive tables effortlessly.
• Streaming and Batch Unification: Supports both streaming and batch data processing, offering flexibility and efficiency.
• Schema Enforcement: Automatically manages schema variations, preventing bad data from sneaking in.
• Time Travel: Enables data versioning, allowing rollbacks and historical audits, perfect for reproducible machine learning experiments.
• Upserts and Deletes: Facilitates complex operations like change-data-capture and streaming upserts.
• Vibrant Connector Ecosystem: Connects with various data processing engines like Apache Spark, Flink, Hive, Trino, and AWS Athena.

These capabilities provide a foundation for building reliable, scalable pipelines that power advanced analytics. With Delta Lake, data teams spend less time troubleshooting broken pipelines and more time creating value.

Real World Use Case at Hexaware

In a recent client implementation at Hexaware, Delta Lake advantages played a pivotal role in transforming the clinical trial data management process for a Contract Research Organization (CRO) conducting a phase III clinical trial for a new oncology treatment.

With 50 sites globally and 1,000 patients enrolled, the CRO faced significant challenges in managing data from diverse sources such as Electronic Data Capture (EDC) systems, Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS), Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), and patient-reported outcomes (PROs). The primary issues included data fragmentation, quality inconsistencies, and stringent security requirements.

Delta Lake enabled a unified, secure, and scalable data platform—leveraging ACID transactions for consistency and auditability. With agile validation mechanisms, the solution ensured data integrity and regulatory compliance, accelerating the clinical trial timeline and contributing to life-saving drug development. This implementation highlights practical delta lake use cases in highly regulated industries.

It also enabled better collaboration between clinical data teams and biostatisticians. Versioned datasets allowed both groups to work on aligned views of the data without interrupting each other’s workflows. The transparency of changes, paired with the system’s performance and audit capabilities, offered peace of mind to stakeholders concerned with FDA compliance and trial integrity.

Deep Dive: Delta Type Widening

Now, let’s explore the fascinating feature of type widening in Delta Lake.

One standout feature of Delta Lake is type widening, which allows schema evolution by changing column types to a wider type—either manually or use schema evolution to evolve column types.

A “wider” type is one that can accommodate a broader range of values or more complex data without losing information. For example, changing a column’s type from INTEGER to BIGINT or from FLOAT to DOUBLE would be considered type widening. This feature is useful in scenarios where the data being ingested evolves over time and requires more flexible schema handling.

Delta Lake schema evolution allows automatic adaptation to changing data types without interrupting pipelines or requiring manual schema updates. In dynamic environments where incoming data types evolve—such as IoT, customer interaction data, or scientific research—type widening ensures data workflows remain resilient and responsive.

Activating Type Widening

This can be activated manually using the ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN command or automatically with schema evolution in INSERT and MERGE INTO commands.

Supported Type Changes

Starting with Delta 3.2 and enhanced in 4.0, type widening supports changes such as converting an int to a long or double. Here’s a quick overview:

Note: To avoid accidental promotion of integer values to decimals, type changes from byte, short, int, or long to decimal or double are not eligible to be applied automatically during schema evolution. You must manually alter the type in that case. Type changes are supported for top-level columns as well as fields nested inside structs, maps, and arrays.

Enable or Disable Type Widening

To enable type widening on an existing table, set up the ‘delta.enableTypeWidening’ table property to ‘true’.

SQL

ALTER TABLE <table_name> SET TBLPROPERTIES (’delta.enableTypeWidening’ = ‘true’)Or during table creation:

SQL

CREATE TABLE <table_name> USING DELTA TBLPROPERTIES(’delta.enableTypeWidening’ = ‘true’)

To disable it, set the property to ‘false’. Disabling type widening prevents future type changes from being applied to the table. It doesn’t affect type changes previously applied and in particular, it doesn’t remove the type widening table feature and doesn’t allow clients that don’t support the type widening table feature to read and write to the table.

Manually Apply a Type Change

With type widening enabled, you can change a column type in this manner:

SQL

ALTER TABLE <table_name> ALTER COLUMN <col_name> TYPE <new_type>

The table schema updates without rewriting the underlying Parquet files.

Type Changes with Automatic Schema Evolution

Automatic type changes occur during ingestion with INSERT and MERGE INTO commands when:

• Type widening is enabled.
• Automatic schema evolution is on.
• The source column type is wider than the target.
• The type change is supported.

Removing the Type Widening Feature

To remove type widening, use the DROP FEATURE command:

SQL

ALTER TABLE <table-name> DROP FEATURE ‘typeWidening-preview’ [TRUNCATE HISTORY]

This ensures column types in files match the Delta table schema.Key Takeaways with Type Widening

Key Takeaways with Type Widening

The ability to adapt to changing data schemas is essential for effective data management. Delta Lake’s type widening feature addresses this need by offering new Delta Lake schema evolution features. This innovative capability not only enhances data quality and reliability but also simplifies the overall data management process.

Below, we explore the key benefits of type widening and how it contributes to a more efficient data landscape.

• Type widening ensures seamless schema evolution: Delta Lake’s type widening feature automatically adapts to schema changes, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
• Improved data quality and reliability: By automatically handling schema changes, type widening reduces the risk of data corruption and ensures data consistency.
• Simplified data management and analysis: Type widening simplifies data management and analysis by eliminating the need for manual schema management.

These Delta Lake advantages empower organizations to manage evolving datasets with flexibility and increased control. Type widening is especially impactful in regulated industries or environments with frequent data schema shifts.

New Features of Delta Lake

Delta Lake 4.0 Preview has been released! Delta Lake 4.0 is the biggest release till date, with features for reliability, performance, and ease of use.

Today, over 60% of the Fortune 500 companies trust Delta Lake, for its features being the quickest data lakehouse storage type. To make managing transactions across your data systems, debugging programs, and handling various types of data easier, Delta is gaining more features on the fly.

Performance and Dependability

As a leading open-source storage layer, it continues to redefine modern data lakehouses. Its latest advancements introduce innovative features that enhance data processing, improve cross-platform compatibility, and support dynamic data structures.

• Delta Connect (Preview): Support for Spark’s new client-server architecture in Delta Lake.
• Coordinated Commits (Preview ): Writes across several clouds and engines, independent of the filesystem’s ability to synchronize commits.
• Open Variant type (preview:) High performance, semi-structured data support that can adapt to changing schemas.

Convenience Features

Lakehouses must change to accommodate new kinds and data. With features that make working with your data easier, Delta Lake is adaptable and can handle data types that change over time.

• Type Widening (Preview): Allows for data sizes to change without requiring table rewriting.
• Identity Columns: ‘Reference keys’ that are automatically produced and will be available soon.
• Collations: Indicates the comparison and ordering of values in a table (coming soon).
• Delta Lake UniForm: Delta Lake UniForm unifies the data in your lakehouse, across all formats and types, for all your analytics and AI workloads. It now supports Apache Hudi and Apache Iceberg with Delta 3.2 on Spark 3.5.
• Delta Lake addresses the need for improved lakehouses, essential to effectively manage the evolving landscape of data. As organizations increasingly rely on diverse data types, Databricks solves the crucial ask for lakehouses to adapt and improve their capabilities.

Conclusion: Level Up Data Management with Delta Lake

To sum up, Delta Lake features stand out as a transformative solution for modern data management challenges, offering robust features that ensure data reliability, security, and performance. Building on the momentum of growing Delta Lake advantages for businesses, Hexaware uses its capabilities for innovation within data and AI strategies, enterprise modernization, and driving real impact with business outcomes across industries.

To learn more about Hexaware and Databricks solutions, explore our comprehensive offerings for enterprise data and AI.  Discover how Hexaware and Databricks can help you unlock innovation with scalable data integrity solutions and cloud storage integration for your data lakehouse.