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Databricks Auto-Loader vs. Delta Live Tables

User16826992185
New Contributor II

What is the difference between Databricks Auto-Loader and Delta Live Tables? Both seem to manage ETL for you but I'm confused on where to use one vs. the other.

2 REPLIES 2

Anand_Ladda
Honored Contributor II

Auto-Loader allows incrementally data ingestion into Delta Lake from a variety of data sources while Delta Live Tables are used for defining end-to-end data pipelines by specifying the data source, the transformation logic, and destination state of the data — instead of manually stitching together siloed data processing jobs.

In effect AutoLoader would be a piece of the DLT pipeline specifically on the data source side as raw data is incrementally brought into Delta Lake. DLT would then pick up from there for the downstream transformation and processing of the data as illustrated here

SteveL
New Contributor II

You say "...__would__ be a piece..." and "...DLT __would__ pick up...".
Is DLT built upon AL?

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