Delta Sharing is an open standard and protocol for secure, cross-platform data sharing, developed by Databricks and the Linux Foundation. It’s cloud-agnostic, enabling organizations to share live data across cloud providers and on-prem locations without copying or replicating the data — preserving data freshness and eliminating duplication costs. We've seen an e-commerce company successfully use Delta Sharing to replace a fragmented partner data-sharing system with a centralized, real-time and secure platform, significantly improving collaboration. The protocol uses a simple REST API to issue short-lived pre-signed URLs, allowing recipients to retrieve large datasets using tools such as pandas, Spark or Power BI. It supports sharing data tables, views, AI models and notebooks. While it provides strong centralized governance and auditing, users should remain mindful of cloud egress costs, which can become a significant operational risk if unmanaged.
