Use Delta Lake ? if you’re in Spark/Databricks world

Apache Hudi

• Created by: Uber.

• Best for: Real-time data ingestion and incremental processing.

• Key Features:

  • Supports streaming upserts & deletes (unique among the three).

  • Maintains two storage types:

    • Copy-on-Write (CoW) → batch-friendly, immutable.

    • Merge-on-Read (MoR) → streaming-friendly, allows near real-time updates.

  • Designed for low-latency ingestion pipelines.

👉 Example use: Keeping a user transactions table updated in near real-time for fraud detection.

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⚖️ Quick Comparison

Feature	Delta Lake	Apache Iceberg	Apache Hudi
Origin	Databricks	Netflix (Apache)	Uber (Apache)
Best For	Batch + Streaming	Large-scale analytics	Real-time ingestion
ACID Transactions	✅	✅	✅
Time Travel	✅	✅	✅
Upserts/Deletes	Good	Limited (rewrite approach)	Excellent (streaming-first)
Engine Support	Spark-heavy	Spark, Flink, Trino, etc.	Spark, Flink, Hive, Presto