Question

A data engineering team is evaluating whether to standardize their lakehouse tables on Delta Lake. A senior architect raises a concern about vendor lock-in and asks how Delta Lake tables physically store their underlying data in cloud object storage. Which statement correctly describes the storage format used by Delta Lake?

Accepted Answer

Delta Lake stores data in an open Parquet file format alongside a transaction log (the _delta_log directory) containing JSON and checkpoint files.

Answer

Delta Lake stores data in a proprietary binary format that can only be read by Databricks Runtime.

Answer

Delta Lake stores data as compressed CSV files with a separate metadata database managed by the metastore.

Answer

Delta Lake stores data exclusively in ORC files with row-level indexes embedded in the file footer.