Since Delta 2.3, deletion vectors have been available, but only recently have we been able to take full advantage of them to improve the performance of write operations. As of Delta 3.1, all operations support deletion vector optimizations. Fabric customers using Runtime 1.3 (Delta 3.2) can now benefit from much faster writes with very little impact on reads.

I frequently hear people talk about Spark as being this complex, pro-dev oriented engine, that is unapproachable to the traditional SQL developer and modern Analytics Engineer. Commonly referenced is the necessity to learn Python, Scala, and completely different data processing constructs.

In any programming environment, handling unreliable processes—whether due to API rate limiting, network instability, or transient failures—can be a significant challenge. This is not exclusive to Spark but applies to distributed systems and programming languages across the board. In this post, we’ll focus on Python (since I’m a PySpark developer) and explore how to make any unstable process more resilient by leveraging the open-source library Tenacity. By adding strategic retry logic with exponential backoff, we can gracefully handle API throttling, server-side failures, and network interruptions to build more robust and fault tolerant solutions.

Spark is fantastic for distributed computing, but can it help with tasks that are not distributed in nature? Reading from a Delta table or similar is simple—Spark’s APIs natively parallelize these types of tasks. But what about user-defined tasks that aren’t inherently distributed?

I was 95% done with writing a fun case study on how to parallelize API calls and other non-distributed tasks in Spark when I realized that I was about to gloss over a extremely foundational topic in Spark: RDDs. While most developers minimally understand the basics of DataFrames, RDDs are less commonly known, partly because they are a lower-level abstraction in Spark and DataFrames are full featured enough that you can often get away without needing to know what an RDD is.