What you'll learn

Traditional data lakes built on simple file formats like Parquet face critical limitations around reliability, consistency, and manageability. Teams struggle with data corruption, failed updates, schema drift, and the inability to time travel or audit changes. Open table formats emerged to solve these fundamental problems, but understanding what they are and which one to choose can be overwhelming. In this course, Open Table Formats: Core Concepts, you'll gain foundational knowledge of how table formats work and why they've become essential in modern data architectures. First, you'll explore what open table formats are and how they differ from traditional Hive-style tables and Parquet-only approaches, understanding the limitations they were designed to overcome. Next, you'll discover the core problems they solve, such as ACID transactions, schema evolution, time travel, data versioning, and reliability guarantees, through concrete examples and visual comparisons. Finally, you'll learn the high-level characteristics that differentiate the three major formats: Iceberg's snapshot-based catalog-centric model, Delta Lake's transaction log simplicity, and Hudi's incremental processing focus with Copy-on-Write and Merge-on-Read table types. When you're finished with this course, you'll have a clear conceptual foundation in open table formats, enabling you to understand architectural discussions, evaluate format choices, and confidently proceed to implementation and design courses in the Open Table Formats learning path.