Azure delta lake — End Architecture in azure

Nripa Chetry
5 min readJul 4, 2023

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Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that runs on top of data lakes, such as Azure Data Lake Storage, Amazon S3, or Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). It provides ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction capabilities and reliability features to big data workloads.

Key features of Delta Lake include:

  1. ACID Transactions: Delta Lake supports atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable transactions, ensuring data integrity and enabling reliable updates, inserts, and deletes.
  2. Schema Enforcement: Delta Lake enforces schema on write, ensuring that data written to the lake adheres to a predefined schema. It helps maintain consistent data structures and prevents data quality issues.
  3. Time Travel: Delta Lake allows users to access and query previous versions of data stored in the lake. This feature enables data versioning, historical analysis, and auditing capabilities.
  4. Optimized Performance: Delta Lake uses advanced indexing and data skipping techniques to optimize data access and query performance. It enables efficient data pruning, predicate pushdown, and other optimizations for faster analytics.
  5. Data Integrity Checks: Delta Lake automatically performs data integrity checks and guarantees data consistency by validating data against specified constraints during write operations.
  6. Metadata Management: Delta Lake stores metadata about the schema, table structure, and transaction logs. It provides a transaction log that can be used for data recovery and tracking changes made to the data.
  7. Unified Batch and Streaming: Delta Lake provides a unified interface for both batch and streaming data processing. It supports both batch data ingestion and real-time streaming ingestion, allowing continuous updates to the lake.

By leveraging Delta Lake, organizations can enhance their data lakes with transactional capabilities, data reliability, and improved query performance. It simplifies data engineering, data quality management, and data governance within big data ecosystems, making it easier to build robust and scalable data pipelines and perform advanced analytics on large volumes of data

Now let's discuss end to end architecture using azure delta lake…

Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that runs on top of data lakes, such as Azure Data Lake Storage, Amazon S3, or Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). It provides ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction capabilities and reliability features to big data workloads.

Key features of Delta Lake include:

  1. ACID Transactions: Delta Lake supports atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable transactions, ensuring data integrity and enabling reliable updates, inserts, and deletes.
  2. Schema Enforcement: Delta Lake enforces schema on write, ensuring that data written to the lake adheres to a predefined schema. It helps maintain consistent data structures and prevents data quality issues.
  3. Time Travel: Delta Lake allows users to access and query previous versions of data stored in the lake. This feature enables data versioning, historical analysis, and auditing capabilities.
  4. Optimized Performance: Delta Lake uses advanced indexing and data skipping techniques to optimize data access and query performance. It enables efficient data pruning, predicate pushdown, and other optimizations for faster analytics.
  5. Data Integrity Checks: Delta Lake automatically performs data integrity checks and guarantees data consistency by validating data against specified constraints during write operations.
  6. Metadata Management: Delta Lake stores metadata about the schema, table structure, and transaction logs. It provides a transaction log that can be used for data recovery and tracking changes made to the data.
  7. Unified Batch and Streaming: Delta Lake provides a unified interface for both batch and streaming data processing. It supports both batch data ingestion and real-time streaming ingestion, allowing continuous updates to the lake.

By leveraging Delta Lake, organizations can enhance their data lakes with transactional capabilities, data reliability, and improved query performance. It simplifies data engineering, data quality management, and data governance within big data ecosystems, making it easier to build robust and scalable data pipelines and perform advanced analytics on large volumes of data

Azure data lake vs Delta lake — what and when

Azure Delta Lake is a storage layer that can be used on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), which is a scalable and secure cloud-based storage service. Azure Delta Lake provides additional capabilities such as ACID transactions, data reliability, and schema enforcement to enhance the functionality of a data lake.

To build an analytics solution architecture, you would typically need both Azure Delta Lake and Azure Data Lake Storage (or a similar data lake storage service) together. Here’s why:

  1. Azure Data Lake Storage: Data lakes, such as Azure Data Lake Storage, are designed to store large volumes of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. They provide scalable and cost-effective storage for diverse data types. Data lakes are essential for ingesting, storing, and organizing raw data before processing and analysis.
  2. Azure Delta Lake: Delta Lake adds a storage layer on top of the data lake, providing additional features like ACID transactions, data reliability, schema enforcement, time travel, and optimized query performance. Delta Lake enhances the data lake by enabling data quality management, data versioning, and data governance capabilities.

3. By combining Azure Data Lake Storage with Azure Delta Lake, you can leverage the benefits of both services. Azure Data Lake Storage serves as the underlying scalable storage layer, while Azure Delta Lake provides the transactional and reliability features that enhance data quality, governance, and analytics capabilities.

In summary, Azure Delta Lake is used in conjunction with Azure Data Lake Storage or similar data lake storage services to create a comprehensive analytics solution architecture. Azure Data Lake Storage provides the scalable storage foundation, and Azure Delta Lake adds transactional capabilities and reliability features to enable more advanced analytics workflows.

let's understand through reference architecture diagram..

In this diagram:

  1. Data Lake Storage: Azure Data Lake Storage (or similar data lake storage service) serves as the foundation for storing large volumes of data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
  2. Delta Lake: Delta Lake provides additional capabilities on top of the data lake, such as ACID transactions, data reliability, and schema enforcement, enhancing data quality and governance.
  3. Data Processing & Transformation: Tools like Azure Databricks and Python programming are commonly used for data processing and transformation tasks. Azure Databricks provides a collaborative and scalable environment for data engineering and analytics, while Python programming offers flexibility and extensibility.
  4. Data Exploration & Analysis: Various tools and libraries are used for data exploration, analysis, and visualization. Azure Databricks notebooks, along with Python libraries like Pandas and NumPy, are frequently employed for data exploration and analysis tasks.
  5. Machine Learning: Python libraries such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch are widely used for machine learning tasks within the analytics solution. These libraries enable model training, evaluation, and deployment.
  6. Visualization Tools: Tools like Power BI and Tableau are often used for data visualization, creating interactive visualizations, and generating insights from analyzed data.
  7. Reporting & Dashboarding Tools: Power BI, Tableau, and other similar tools are commonly utilized for creating reports and dashboards, enabling business users to access and interpret analytics results effectively.

It’s important to note that this diagram represents a high-level overview, and the specific tool choices and configurations can vary based on the requirements and preferences of the analytics solution being built.

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Nripa Chetry

Digital Transformation through Data Analytics and cloud,