Delta Lake 3.0: UniForm and Liquid Clustering

In this brief demonstration, we give you a first look at Delta Lake 3.0 main capabilities.

Universal Format

Delta Universal Format (UniForm) enables reading Delta in the format needed by the application, improving compatibility and expanding the ecosystem. Delta will automatically generate metadata needed for Apache Iceberg or Apache Hudi, so users don’t have to choose or do manual conversions between formats. With UniForm, Delta is the universal format that works across ecosystems.

Launch product tour

Liquid Clustering

Liquid Clustering is a smart data management technique for Delta tables. It is flexible and automatically adjusts the data layout based on clustering keys. Liquid Clustering dynamically clusters data based on data patterns, which helps to avoid the over- or under-partitioning problems that can occur with Hive partitioning.

 

Note - at Data + AI Summit in June 2025, Databricks released Lakeflow. Lakeflow unifies Data Engineering with Lakeflow Connect, Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines (previously known as DLT), and Lakeflow Jobs (previously known as Workflows).