Delta Sharing is seeing unimaginable momentum, with a 300% year-over-year progress in energetic shares. This is not simply one-time file transfers; it represents sustained, ongoing collaboration that proves actual worth is being exchanged.

A key issue on this progress is the platform’s open philosophy. Delta Sharing permits clients to share any Information and AI asset, with anybody, with none friction.  40% of Delta Sharing  energetic shares are with recipients exterior the Databricks ecosystem. This demonstrates that Delta Sharing is powering an open collaboration ecosystem that reaches throughout platforms and clouds.

On this put up, we’ve gathered the highest 10 questions folks ask about Delta Sharing. Hold studying to get the overview, why it’s totally different, what the most typical use circumstances are, and what you want to get began.

1. What’s Delta Sharing?

Delta Sharing is essentially the most extensively adopted open protocol for safe information sharing. It lets organizations alternate reside information and AI belongings throughout platforms and clouds.

2. What makes Delta Sharing totally different?

Most sharing instruments drive you to repeat information to a brand new vacation spot, creating stale silos and increasing your assault floor. Delta Sharing allows you to learn reside information on the supply, so there’s nothing to maneuver or duplicate.

Second, as a result of Delta Sharing is open supplyit isn’t tied to a single ecosystem. You’ll be able to share out of your Databricks lakehouse or elsewhere, and recipients can eat the info whether or not they use Databricks or not.

Lastly, recipients join via customary, open connectors: Python, Apache Spark, Java, Energy BI, and extra, to learn the shared tables you authorize.

Taken collectively, Delta Sharing supplies platform-independent collaboration for information and AI throughout groups, instruments, and clouds. You’re in a position to work with out lock-in, with out copies, and with out governance gaps.

3. Does Delta Sharing work with Iceberg? If I exploit Apache Iceberg, how can I leverage Delta Sharing?

Sure, Delta Sharing is absolutely suitable with Apache Iceberg. By selecting Delta Sharing, you get the very best of each worlds: entry to the widest collaboration ecosystem with Apache Iceberg seamlessly working as your information supply and vacation spot, whereas leveraging the total energy of Delta Sharing.

Delta Sharing makes sharing a first-class primitive in Iceberg. With distinctive options similar to OIDC token federationwhich permits open recipients to authenticate with customized IdPs, and Community Gateway, which simplifies and scales community configuration, clients unlock full interoperability throughout desk codecs.

Tables managed in Unity Catalog can now be shared with Iceberg purchasers similar to Snowflake, Trino, and Spark. Moreover, international Iceberg tables managed by catalogs like Hive Metastore or AWS Glue might be federated into Unity Catalog after which shared via the identical protocol. In each circumstances, you register the tables in Unity Catalog, create a share, and add related recipients both on or off Databricks. This ensures Iceberg customers can collaborate with Databricks clients utilizing reside, ruled information—with out shifting or duplicating it.

4. Can I exploit Delta Sharing to share information with customers who are usually not Databricks’ clients?

Sure, you possibly can share information with all of your recipients, no matter whether or not they use Databricks or every other platform. Delta Sharing is an open protocol that works each for Databricks-to-Databricks sharing, in addition to Open Sharing. Delta Sharing supplies open connectors that recipients can use on any platform together with an Apache Spark connector, a Pandas connector, an Iceberg Relaxation Catalog connector, in addition to a PowerBI, Tableau, and Excel connectors. Open sharing permits you to share not solely tables, but in addition views, partitions, and alter information feeds, permitting you to optimize your information sharing expertise even when sharing externally.

5. Why use Delta Sharing? What issues does it remedy?

We have checked out how 1000’s of consumers are utilizing Delta Sharing and located 4 major methods it actually makes a distinction for his or her companies.

6. If I already share information utilizing SFTP, S3, Dropbox, or e mail, why would I want Delta Sharing?

When you’re nonetheless sharing information via SFTP, S3, Dropbox, or e mail, you’re exposing your group to pointless threat and inefficiency. See what occurred to Finastra the place attackers exploited SFTP weak point stealing roughly 400GB of delicate information.

These outdated‑college tips may fit, however they’re dated and fragile. You find yourself copying full recordsdata, juggling static passwords or keys that by no means expire, and creating numerous out‑of‑sync copies that open up main safety and compliance gaps. Delta Sharing replaces all of that with a contemporary, safe, and auditable strategy. You’ll be able to share simply the precise tables, rows, or columns somebody wants (and AI Fashions as nicely), and the individual pulling the info all the time sees the most recent model as a result of there’s no further copy hanging round.

Safety is tighter, too. As a substitute of handing out static passwords or entry keys, Delta Sharing palms out quick‑lived tokens, and it may hook into the id system you already use, so that you by no means need to handle a separate set of credentials. Each time somebody seems on the information, it’s logged in Unity Catalog, which makes auditing and compliance lots simpler.

When you’re critical about defending delicate information and simplifying collaboration, Delta Sharing isn’t a “good to have”; it’s the baseline for safe information alternate right now.

Try How Kythera Labs, a Databricks Constructed-On Accomplice, saves $2M+/yr utilizing Delta Sharing

7. What sorts of belongings can I share utilizing Delta Sharing?

You’ll be able to share nearly any type of information or AI asset with Delta Sharing, and that breadth is fairly distinctive. These embody tables (and desk partitions), streaming tablesmanaged Iceberg tables, international schemas & tables, views (together with dynamic views for row/column filtering), materialized views, volumesnotebooks, and AI fashions. When you share a whole schema (database), every little thing in it (tables, views, volumes, fashions) is shared instantly, and any new belongings added later will even turn into out there to recipients. All of those belongings are tied to a single Unity Catalog metastoremaintaining the sharing clear and arranged.

8. How does Delta Sharing preserve the info secure when a supplier shares it with a recipient?

Delta Sharing makes use of a zero‑belief, token‑primarily based strategy. When somebody asks for information, the sharing server checks Unity Catalog, then palms out a brief‑lived, learn‑solely token or a pre‑signed URL that factors on to the storage—so no everlasting passwords ever go away the supplier. All site visitors is wrapped in TLS encryption, and each request is logged for audit. Inside Databricks‑to‑Databricks, the handshake is dealt with mechanically; exterior customers can authenticate with easy credential recordsdata or OIDC federation, however the identical non permanent token, encrypted, and absolutely audited mannequin applies. This ensures solely the suitable folks can see the suitable information, and just for a restricted time. Learn How Delta Sharing Permits Safe Finish-to-Finish Collaboration for a deep dive.

9. That sounds good. What are the fee implications of utilizing Delta Sharing?

Getting began with Delta Sharing doesn’t value a dime — there’s no cost to arrange, configure, or share an information set or AI Mannequin. You solely see a invoice when somebody really queries the info, and even then, the charges break down into three clear items.

First, the compute value (the processing energy wanted to run the question) is normally paid by the individual doing the question, although the info‑proprietor can select to cowl it if that makes extra sense.

Second, there’s the egress value for shifting information out of the supplier’s cloud; the newer R2 mode (now GA) even affords a “zero egress” possibility, so you possibly can keep away from that cost altogether.

Third, storage value solely issues in the event you determine to maintain a replicated copy—reside, on‑the‑fly entry doesn’t require further house.

Right here ’s a Databricks to Databricks share instance: think about a provider on AWS shares a materialized view to a retailer on Azure. When the info is shared, the provider pays egress for information leaving AWS, and when the retailer runs a question on the shared information, the retailer pays compute for the question.

10. What do I want to start out utilizing Delta Sharing?

The necessities depend upon whether or not you might be sharing with a Databricks recipient or a non-Databricks recipient.

Exterior sharing have to be enabled, and organizations ought to observe governance and potential cross-cloud egress prices.

Able to get began?

Keep tuned for the following collection of questions, the place we’ll discover matters together with safety, how Delta Sharing powers merchandise like Clear Rooms and Databricks Market, and different superior options.