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Comment by sys13 | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare with delta lake and iceberg?

Vortex is a file format, where as delta lake and iceberg are table formats. it should be compared to Parquet rather than delta lake and iceberg. This guest lecture by a maintainer of Vortex provides a good overview of the file format, motivations for its creation and its key features.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyn_T5uragA

I think it would still make sense to compare with those table formats, or is the idea that you would only use this if you could not use a table format?

That’s like comparing words with characters.

Vortex is, roughly, how you save data to files and Iceberg is the database-like manager of those files. You’ll soon be able to run Iceberg using Vortex because they are complementary, not competing, technologies.

The website could use a comparison / motivation in comparison to Parquet (beyond just stating it's 100x better).

Agreed, really need a tl;dr here, because Parquet is boring technology. Going to require quite the sales pitch to move. At minimum, I assume it will be years before I could expect native integration in pandas/polars/etc which would make it low effort enough to consider.

Parquet is ..fine, I guess. It is good enough. Why invoke churn? Sell me on the vision.

DuckDB just added support for vortex in their last release using the Vortex Python package so hopefully other tools wont be too far behind

> Going to require quite the sales pitch to move.

Mutability would be one such pitch I would like to see ...

As others said, Vortex is complementary to the table Formats you mentioned.

There are other formats though that it can be compared to.

The Lance columnar format is one: https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb

And Nimble from Meta is another: https://github.com/facebookincubator/nimble

Parquet is so core to data infra and widespread, that removing it from its throne is a really really hard task.

The people behind these projects that are willing to try and do this, have my total respect.

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