Apache Paimon is an open-source data lake format designed to enable lakehouse architecture. It integrates seamlessly with processing engines like Flink and Spark, supporting both streaming and batch operations. A key advantage of Paimon's architecture lies in its fusion of a standard data lake format with an LSM (log-structured merge-tree) structure. This combination addresses the traditional challenges of high-performance updates and low-latency reads in data lakes. Paimon supports primary key tables for high-throughput, real-time updates and includes a customizable merge engine for deduplication, partial updates and aggregations. This design enables efficient streaming data ingestion and management of mutable state directly within the lake. Paimon also provides mature data lake capabilities such as scalable metadata, ACID transactions, time travel, schema evolution and optimized data layouts through compression and Z-ordering. We recommend evaluating Paimon for projects that need a unified storage layer capable of efficiently handling large-scale append-only data and complex, real-time streaming updates.
