Effortlessly read Delta Lake tables using Apache Iceberg readers
Microsoft Fabric is a unified, SaaS data and analytics platform designed for the era of AI. All workloads in Microsoft Fabric use Delta Lake as the standard, open-source table format. With Microsoft OneLake, Fabric’s unified SaaS data lake, customers can unify their data estate across multiple cloud and on-prem systems.
We’re thrilled to announce an exciting new Preview capability in OneLake: you can now automatically read Delta Lake tables using Apache Iceberg compatible readers, with no need for migration, copying, or manual conversion. This enhancement gives data engineers and analytics teams unprecedented flexibility in how they access and interact with their data.
This latest feature builds on the foundation established last year, when we introduced automatic support for Iceberg: Iceberg tables brought to OneLake are instantly readable as Delta Lake formatted tables. Now, with both directions supported, users have the freedom to access their data in the format that best suits their analytics workflows—regardless of how it was originally written. Try this today!
Unified table access — just one setting away
Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg are both popular open standards for table formats in data lake. Now, with a single workspace-level setting in OneLake, you can enable automatic Delta Lake to Iceberg virtualization for all of your Delta Lake tables.
Simply turn this setting on, and any data items that contain Delta Lake tables will automatically have those tables appear as Iceberg tables too — no extra work required.
- On-the-fly virtualization access your Delta Lake tables as Iceberg tables with tools and engines that support the Iceberg format.
- No data movement, there’s no need to migrate, copy, or convert your data. Everything is available in place.
- Simple enablement simply toggle a single workspace setting and all eligible Delta Lake tables are automatically virtualized as Iceberg tables.
- Effortless analytics unlock new opportunities and simplify your analytics workflows without changing your current data or infrastructure.
How it works
There’s nothing extra you need to do after enabling the workspace setting — Delta Lake tables in the Tables section of your Fabric data items, such as lakehouses, are automatically available in the Iceberg format within OneLake. This means you can use your favorite Iceberg-compatible analytics tools to read your Delta Lake data directly, enabling new possibilities for cross-platform analytics and collaboration.
Try this out today and check back for a follow-up blog post on how this works behind the scenes!
Start exploring
OneLake is making data access more open and flexible than ever before. To discover how to take advantage of this capability and learn about current limitations and considerations of this Preview feature, check out the Microsoft OneLake documentation.
Stay tuned for more improvements as we gather feedback during Preview!