Delta Lake
Ranked 3 of 3 table formats by recommenders
Open-source table format for data lakes, valued for compaction, parallel writers and space savings.
Open-source table format for data lakes, valued for compaction, parallel writers and space savings.
8 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 63%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Often listed alongside Iceberg and DuckLake
“I feel like this is what delta lake and ducklake are largely solving for. And then some.”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “Buckets and objects are not enough” “Delta, Iceberg should be in the list”
Comment from 14 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Data Engineering Book – An open source, community-driven guide” Multiple manifests and compaction design
“I'd again point to DeltaLake for the "good" design here, which is to have multiple manifests and compaction, which also unlocks parallel writers.”
Comment from 24 Feb 2026 in “A distributed queue in a single JSON file on object storage” Large space savings
“getting a fuck ton of more space savings”
Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data”
Other table formats people recommend
The two most recommended other table formats, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DuckLake | 36 | 9 | 80% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Apache Iceberg | 26 | 6 | 81% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Delta LakeThis page | 5 | 3 | 63% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
7 of the 8 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“it would fail compactions, if you run it fast enough”
“getting a fuck ton of more space savings”
“I feel like this is what delta lake and ducklake are largely solving for. And then some.”
“I'd again point to DeltaLake for the "good" design here, which is to have multiple manifests and compaction, which also unlocks parallel writers.”
“Delta, Iceberg should be in the list”
“I don't think it actually solves your core problem”
“Delta lake and Iceberg do not enforce primary key constraints”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.