Delta Lake review and pricing

Delta Lake is the open table format created at Databricks, open-sourced under the Linux Foundation in 2019, and the native format for the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. It remains strong inside Databricks (Unity Catalog assumes Delta as the default) and has hedged for the Iceberg-dominant 2025-2026 landscape via Delta UniForm (2024), which writes Iceberg metadata in parallel so external engines can read Delta tables as if they were Iceberg. The honest framing: if Databricks is your primary engine, Delta is the right format; if you want format neutrality across hyperscalers, Iceberg is winning. Microsoft Fabric OneLake also uses Delta natively, which keeps Delta relevant outside Databricks.