Skip to content
LakeBench
ProblemsCommunityPricing
Sign inStart practicing
Back
  1. Home
  2. Interview prep
  3. What is Apache Hudi? Compare Delta / Iceberg / Hudi

File formats & storage · Formats & Table Formats

What is Apache Hudi? Compare Delta / Iceberg / Hudi

Mediumformat-07
HudiDeltaIcebergupsertCDCcomparison

Question

What is Apache Hudi, and how does it compare to Delta Lake and Iceberg?

Solution

Apache Hudi (Hadoop Upserts Deletes and Incrementals) is a lakehouse table format aimed at incremental data and upsert-heavy pipelines: CDC landing, near-real-time tables, and efficient upserts on cloud storage.

Hudi table types (know these names)

  • Copy-on-Write (CoW): updates rewrite Parquet files; reads stay simple/fast
  • Merge-on-Read (MoR): base files + log/delta files; merge at read (or compact later) for faster writes
CDC / Kafka
    -> Hudi upserts (CoW rewrite OR MoR log append)
    -> queries see latest view after merge/compaction

Comparison table (Delta vs Iceberg vs Hudi)

| Capability | Delta Lake | Iceberg | Hudi | |-------------------------|-------------------------|----------------------------|-------------------------------| | Core idea | Tx log on Parquet | Snapshots + manifests | Upsert/incremental first | | ACID / time travel | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Upsert / CDC focus | Strong MERGE | Strong, engine-dependent | Core design goal | | Write patterns | Batch + streaming merges| Batch + streaming writers | CoW / MoR trade-offs | | Compaction | OPTIMIZE / vacuum | rewrite / expire snapshots | Compaction critical for MoR | | Multi-engine | Growing | Very strong | Strong Spark/Flink story |

Interview tip: Frame Hudi as "built for incremental upserts and MoR/CoW trade-offs," Delta as "transaction log lakehouse," Iceberg as "open metadata + multi-engine." Pick based on CDC intensity and engine mix, not brand loyalty.

PreviousNext