By MICHAEL CIRCLE
The Data Group News Service
Databricks, a data and AI company, announced Monday it has agreed to acquire Tabular, the company founded by the original creators of the open-source Apache Iceberg data format.
The acquisition aims to bring interoperability between Iceberg and Linux Foundation's Delta Lake, which was created by Databricks. While both are open formats for data lakehouses, they "became incompatible due to independent development," the press release stated.
"Databricks pioneered the lakehouse architecture in 2020 to enable the integration of traditional data warehousing workloads with AI workloads on a single, governed copy of data," the release said. "Four years later, 74% of enterprises have deployed a lakehouse architecture."
However, the fragmentation between Iceberg and Delta Lake has "undermined the value of the lakehouse architecture."
"Companies need data interoperability to realize the benefits of the lakehouse, and Databricks will work closely with the Delta Lake and Iceberg communities to bring interoperability to the formats over time," said Ali Ghodsi, Databricks' co-founder and CEO. "Last year, we announced Delta Lake UniForm to bring interoperability to these two formats, and we're thrilled to bring together the foremost leaders to make UniForm the best way to unify your data for every workload."
Both Databricks and Tabular have championed open source. "Databricks is the largest and most successful independent open source company by revenue and has donated 12 million lines of code to open source projects," the release stated.
Ryan Blue, Tabular's co-founder and CEO, said "We created Apache Iceberg to solve critical data challenges...With Tabular joining Databricks, we intend to build the best data management platform based on open lakehouse formats so that companies don't have to worry about picking the 'right' format or getting locked into proprietary data formats."
Read more about this acquisition by visiting Databricks Agrees to Acquire Tabular, the Company Founded by the Original Creators of Apache Iceberg - Databricks.
***
Want to stay in the know about Data Industry news? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter!
Each Monday we will send out the top stories of the week straight to your inbox. Best part? It’s FREE, courtesy The Data Group News Service.
