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Advantage of using Photon Engine

The following summarizes the advantages of Photon:

  • Supports SQL and equivalent DataFrame operations against Delta and Parquet tables.
  • Expected to accelerate queries that process a significant amount of data (100GB+) and include aggregations and joins.
  • Data is accessed repeatedly and likely in the Delta Lake cache.
  • More robust scan performance on tables with many columns and many small files.
  • Faster Delta and Parquet writing using UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE INTO, INSERT and CREATE TABLE AS SELECT especially for wide tables (hundreds to thousands of columns).
  • Photon replaces sort-merge joins with hash-joins.

More details are on - https://docs.databricks.com/runtime/photon.html