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Delta Lake VS PostgreSQL

Compare Delta Lake VS PostgreSQL and see what are their differences

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Delta Lake logo Delta Lake

Application and Data, Data Stores, and Big Data Tools

PostgreSQL logo PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.
  • Delta Lake Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-26
  • PostgreSQL Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

Delta Lake features and specs

  • ACID Transactions
    Delta Lake provides ACID transaction capabilities, which ensure data integrity and reliability across operations, allowing for data consistency even in the case of concurrent reads and writes.
  • Time Travel
    Delta Lake enables time travel, allowing users to query snapshots of data at different points in the past. This feature is useful for auditing, debugging, and recovering data.
  • Scalability
    Delta Lake is built on top of Apache Spark, allowing it to scale efficiently across big data workloads and handle large volumes of data with ease.
  • Schema Evolution
    Delta Lake supports schema evolution, allowing schema changes such as adding or deleting columns, without significantly affecting data ingestion or requiring rewrite of historical data.
  • Unified Batch and Streaming
    Delta Lake offers support for both batch and streaming data processing, simplifying data pipelines and reducing the complexity of data workflows.

Possible disadvantages of Delta Lake

  • Complexity
    Delta Lake introduces additional complexity due to the need to manage Delta tables and understand Delta-specific features and configurations.
  • Storage Costs
    The features of Delta Lake, such as ACID compliance and time travel, can increase storage costs, as they often require versioning and additional metadata.
  • Dependency on Spark
    Delta Lake is tightly integrated with Apache Spark, which means that it's best utilized within a Spark ecosystem, limiting flexibility if different processing engines are preferred.
  • Learning Curve
    Adopting Delta Lake may require a learning curve for teams unfamiliar with its architecture and features, potentially slowing down initial adoption.
  • Performance Overhead
    The transactional features and capabilities of Delta Lake can introduce some performance overhead, particularly when handling very large datasets with frequent updates.

PostgreSQL features and specs

  • Open Source
    PostgreSQL is an open-source database management system, which means it is free to use, modify, and distribute. This reduces the cost of database management for individuals and organizations.
  • ACID Compliance
    PostgreSQL is fully ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant, ensuring reliable transactions and data integrity.
  • Extensible
    PostgreSQL is highly extensible, allowing users to add custom functions, data types, and operators. This enables tailored solutions to specific requirements.
  • Advanced SQL Features
    PostgreSQL supports advanced SQL features like full-text search, JSON and XML data types, and complex queries, providing powerful tools for database operations.
  • Community Support
    There is a strong and active community around PostgreSQL, offering extensive documentation, forums, and collaborative support, which aids troubleshooting and development.
  • Multiple Indexing Techniques
    PostgreSQL offers a variety of indexing techniques such as B-tree, GIN, GiST, and BRIN, allowing for optimized query performance on various data types.
  • Cross-Platform Availability
    PostgreSQL runs on all major operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Unix), giving flexibility in deployment and development environments.

Possible disadvantages of PostgreSQL

  • Complex Configuration
    Setting up and configuring PostgreSQL can be complex and time-consuming, especially for beginners, requiring a good understanding of its parameters and best practices.
  • Heavy Resource Consumption
    PostgreSQL can be resource-intensive, consuming significant CPU and memory compared to other database systems, which may affect performance on lower-end hardware.
  • Backup and Restore Process
    The backup and restore process in PostgreSQL is not as straightforward as in some other database systems, requiring more manual intervention and understanding of tools like pg_dump and pg_restore.
  • Replication Complexity
    While PostgreSQL supports replication, setting it up can be more complex than some other databases. Advanced configurations like multi-master replication can be particularly challenging.
  • Steeper Learning Curve
    Due to its advanced features and extensive capabilities, PostgreSQL can have a steeper learning curve, making it harder for new users to get started compared to simpler database systems.
  • Less Third-Party Tool Support
    PostgreSQL has less support from third-party tools compared to more widely adopted databases like MySQL, which can limit options for auxiliary functions like administration, monitoring, and development.

Delta Lake videos

A Thorough Comparison of Delta Lake, Iceberg and Hudi

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Delta Lake for apache Spark | How does it work | How to use delta lake | Delta Lake for Spark ACID
  • Review - ACID ORC, Iceberg, and Delta Lake—An Overview of Table Formats for Large Scale Storage and Analytics

PostgreSQL videos

Comparison of PostgreSQL and MongoDB

More videos:

  • Review - PostgreSQL Review
  • Review - MySQL vs PostgreSQL - Why you shouldn't use MySQL

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Delta Lake and PostgreSQL)
Office & Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
2 2%
98% 98
Development
100 100%
0% 0
Relational Databases
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Delta Lake and PostgreSQL

Delta Lake Reviews

We have no reviews of Delta Lake yet.
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PostgreSQL Reviews

Data Warehouse Tools
Peliqan acts as a bridge, allowing you to e.g. effortlessly pull your PostgreSQL data into Google Sheets for easy access and analysis using its one-click connector. Additionally, Peliqan’s platform provides a user-friendly environment for data exploration, transformation with Magical SQL, and visualization capabilities, all without needing to switch between multiple tools.
Source: peliqan.io
Top 5 BigQuery Alternatives: A Challenge of Complexity
For over three decades, the open-source object-relational database system PostgreSQL has maintained its reputation as a top SQL server due to its features, performance, and reliability. (Heck, Redshift is even based on Postgres!) It's the go-to database solution for large corporations and organizations across a variety of industries from ecommerce to gaming to...
Source: blog.panoply.io
10 Best Database Management Software Of 2022 [+ Examples]
Applications Manager offers out-of-the-box health and performance monitoring for 20 popular databases including RDBMS, NoSQL, in-memory, distributed, and big data stores. It supports both commercial databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, and MongoDB as well as open source ones like MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Source: theqalead.com
ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB
Recently, TimescaleDB published a blog comparing ClickHouse & TimescaleDB using timescale/tsbs, a timeseries benchmarking framework. I have some experience with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse but never got the chance to play with TimescaleDB. Some of the claims about TimescaleDB made in their post are very bold, that made me even more curious. I thought it’d be a great...
9 Best MongoDB alternatives in 2019
PostgreSQL is a widely popular open source database management system. It provides support for both SQL for relational and JSON for non-relational queries.
Source: www.guru99.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Delta Lake should be more popular than PostgreSQL. It has been mentiond 35 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Delta Lake mentions (35)

  • Twitter's 600-Tweet Daily Limit Crisis: Soaring GCP Costs and the Open Source Fix Elon Musk Ignored
    Delta Lake: Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that provides ACID transactions, scalable metadata management, and data versioning on top of existing data lakes. It aims to bring reliability and performance optimizations to big data workloads while ensuring data integrity and consistency. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Stream Processing Systems in 2025: RisingWave, Flink, Spark Streaming, and What's Ahead
    When it comes to stream processing systems, Iceberg support varies across vendors. Databricks, which oversees Spark Streaming, focuses on Delta Lake. Apache Flink, heavily influenced by Alibaba’s contributions, promotes Paimon, an alternative to Iceberg. RisingWave, on the other hand, fully embraces Iceberg. Rather than focusing solely on one table format, RisingWave aims to support various catalog services,... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • 25 Open Source AI Tools to Cut Your Development Time in Half
    Delta Lake is a storage layer framework that provides reliability to data lakes. It addresses the challenges of managing large-scale data in lakehouse architectures, where data is stored in an open format and used for various purposes, like machine learning (ML). Data engineers can build real-time pipelines or ML applications using Delta Lake because it supports both batch and streaming data processing. It also... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Make Rust Object Oriented with the dual-trait pattern
    There is a neat example, of how a third party project belonging to the Linux Foundation, is implementing UserDefinedLogicalNodeCore: MetricObserver in delta-rs. The developer had to use only #[derive(Debug, Hash, Eq, PartialEq)] to get dyn_eq and dyn_hash implemented. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Delta Lake vs. Parquet: A Comparison
    Delta is pretty great, let's you do upserts into tables in DataBricks much easier than without it. I think the website is here: https://delta.io. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

PostgreSQL mentions (16)

  • Convert insert mutation to upsert
    In this quick post, we’ll walk through implementing an Upsert operation in Hasura using PostgreSQL and GraphQL. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Perfect Elixir: Environment Setup
    I’m on MacOS and erlang.org, elixir-lang.org, and postgresql.org all suggest installation via Homebrew, which is a very popular package manager for MacOS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Rust & MySQL: connect, execute SQL statements and stored procs using crate sqlx.
    According to the documentation, crate sqlx is implemented in Rust, and it's database agnostic: it supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MSSQL. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Really tired. Is PostgreSQL even runnable in Windows 10? pgAdmin4 stucks at Loading whatever I try.
    Solution is just downloading and installilng pgAdmin from official pgAdmin homepage version, not the one that is included in the postgresql.org package. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Why SQL is right for Infrastructure Management
    SQL immediately stands out here because it was designed for making relational algebra, the other side of the Entity-Relationship model, accessible. There are likely more people who know SQL than any programming language (for IaC) or data format you could choose to represent your cloud infrastructure. Many non-programmers know it, as well, such as data scientists, business analysts, accountants, etc, and there is... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Delta Lake and PostgreSQL, you can also consider the following products

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

MySQL - The world's most popular open source database

Amazon SageMaker - Amazon SageMaker provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly.

Microsoft SQL - Microsoft SQL is a best in class relational database management software that facilitates the database server to provide you a primary function to store and retrieve data.

Apache Zeppelin - A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics.

SQLite - SQLite Home Page