Databricks Acquires Tabular to Unite Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg for an Open Lakehouse

Open source changes the world.

On June 4 (local time), U.S. big data and AI company Databricks announced on its website that it agreed to acquire data‑management company Tabular, founded by the original creators of Apache Iceberg, Ryan Blue, Daniel Weeks and Jason Reid.

Databricks said it will work with Tabular to realize a shared vision of an open lakehouse, integrating Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake so that the two communities can cooperate closely, bring format compatibility to lakehouses, and better integrate customers’ private data for AI services.

Databricks co‑founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi stated: “Databricks pioneered the Lakehouse; over the past four years the world has embraced the Lakehouse architecture, which combines the advantages of data warehouses and data lakes, helping customers reduce TCO, embrace openness and deliver AI projects faster. Unfortunately, the Lakehouse paradigm has split into two dominant formats—Delta Lake and Iceberg. Databricks and Tabular will collaborate with the open‑source community to bring these formats closer together over time, increasing openness and reducing data silos and friction for customers.”

With the original Iceberg team joining, Databricks will greatly expand the future of Delta Lake UniForm.

“Last year we announced Delta Lake UniForm to provide interoperability between the two formats, and we are excited to bring together the leading open‑data lakehouse formats, making UniForm the best way to unify data for every workload.”

At the Data+AI Summit held June 10‑13, Databricks will detail the deep cooperation and future plans; the summit is expected to be packed and more focused on LLMs.

The acquisition has caused a stir in the data community, sparking discussions such as “Will a unified format benefit everyone?”, “Will Hudi be left in an awkward position after the strong union of Delta Lake and Iceberg?”, and “I say Iceberg will win.”

The DataFun community sees this not as a victory for a single company or product but as a win for open source. Guo Wei, CEO of Baijie Open Source and Apache Foundation member, noted that Tabular raised $20 M last year, valued at $100‑200 M, and the $1‑2 B price is a good deal, reflecting market recognition of open source. He added that while many core features of Delta Lake remain closed source, Apache Iceberg wins more support with its comprehensive features, simple configuration, and open community.

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Snowflake, another data PaaS giant, has long competed with Databricks and will also host a Data Cloud Summit in June. The upcoming events will highlight product strategies, technical roadmaps, and differentiating ideas, with experts providing deep analysis.

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