Real-Time Data Sharing in Databricks: Streaming Data with Delta Sharing

Delta Sharing is an open protocol for securely sharing live data across organizations, regardless of the computing platforms they use. Databricks implements Delta Sharing natively in Unity Catalog, allowing you to share data stored in Delta Lake with external users without needing to copy or replicate the data.

Key Features of Delta Sharing

1. Open Protocol: Allows sharing data across different platforms, including Databricks, Snowflake, Apache Spark, and pandas.
2. Real-time Data Access: Consumers always access the latest data without needing ETL pipelines or data duplication.
3. Fine-Grained Access Control: With Unity Catalog, you can manage permissions at the catalog, schema, table, or even row level.
4. Cross-Cloud Sharing: You can share data across different cloud providers (Azure, AWS, and GCP).
5. No Data Replication: Consumers query the shared Delta table directly from its storage location.

How Delta Sharing Works in Databricks

Delta Sharing uses a Share-Recipient model:

1. Data Provider (Sharer) — Databricks to Databricks Share

• Creates a Share (a collection of tables to be shared).
• Adds tables from the Unity Catalog to the…