If Delta Lake Uses Immutable Files, How Do UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE Work?

Listen and Watch here One of the most common questions data engineers ask is: if Delta Lake stores data in immutable Parquet files, how can it support operations like UPDATE , DELETE , and MERGE ? The answer lies in Delta Lake’s transaction log and its clever file rewrite mechanism. 🔍 Immutable Files in Delta Lake Delta Lake stores data in Parquet files, which are immutable by design. This immutability ensures consistency and prevents accidental corruption. But immutability doesn’t mean data can’t change — it means changes are handled by creating new versions of files rather than editing them in place. ⚡ How UPDATE Works When you run an UPDATE statement, Delta Lake: Identifies the files containing rows that match the update condition. Reads those files and applies the update logic. Writes out new Parquet files with the updated rows. Marks the old files as removed in the transaction log. UPDATE people SET age = age + 1 WHERE country = 'India'; Result: ...

DIRECT ACYCLIC GRAPH (DAG)

Significance of the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) in PySpark:

The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) in PySpark (and Spark in general) represents the logical execution plan of a Spark job. It is a graph where each node represents an operation (transformation or action) to be executed on the data, and edges represent the dependencies between these operations.

The significance of the DAG in PySpark lies in its role in optimizing and executing Spark jobs efficiently:

Optimization: When you write PySpark code, it gets transformed into a DAG representing the logical sequence of operations. Spark's Catalyst optimizer analyzes this DAG and applies various optimizations, such as predicate pushdown, projection pruning, and constant folding, to generate an optimized physical execution plan.

Lazy Evaluation: PySpark uses lazy evaluation, which means that transformations are not executed immediately when they are called. Instead, they are added to the DAG. This allows Spark to optimize the entire sequence of transformations before executing them, improving performance by reducing unnecessary computations.

Fault Tolerance: The DAG helps Spark achieve fault tolerance by enabling it to reconstruct lost data partitions based on the lineage information stored in the DAG. If a partition is lost due to a node failure, Spark can use the DAG to recompute the lost partition from the original data source.

Execution Planning: The DAG is used to plan the execution of Spark jobs. Spark breaks down the DAG into stages based on the presence of shuffle operations (like joins or aggregations). Each stage consists of a set of tasks that can be executed in parallel, based on the DAG's structure.

Visualizing Job Structure: The DAG can be visualized using tools like the Spark UI or third-party tools, providing insights into the structure of the Spark job, its dependencies, and potential bottlenecks. This visualization can be helpful for debugging and performance tuning.

In summary, the DAG plays a crucial role in optimizing, scheduling, and executing PySpark jobs efficiently, enabling Spark to achieve high performance and fault tolerance.


Hope it helps!

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If Delta Lake Uses Immutable Files, How Do UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE Work?