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Data Engineering
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I don't have Upsert/Merge use cases. Should I use Delta or can I use Parquet?

brickster_2018
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee
 
2 REPLIES 2

Ryan_Chynoweth
Esteemed Contributor

I would recommend using Delta. Delta stores data as parquet files so you still get a lot of the benefits of parquet with Delta. Even though you don't need to merge data, I would assume you will still want to take advantage of the update/delete functionality of delta. Plus delta will offer better optimization techniques to ensure that your data can be queries efficiently (file pruning, z ordering etc.).

The conversion between delta and parquet is easy so you can always test out both and see which you prefer.

aladda
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee

Delta has significant value beyond the DML/ACID capabilities. Delta's data organization strategies that @Ryan Chynoweth​ mentions also offer an advantage even for read-only use cases for querying and joining the data. Delta also supports in-place conversion from Parquet. See this for details - https://docs.databricks.com/spark/latest/spark-sql/language-manual/delta-convert-to-delta.html

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