Delta Sharing Protocol

What it is and why it matters

Delta Sharing is an open protocol for sharing tables in the Delta Lake format across organisations, tool stacks, and cloud regions — without copying the data and without locking either side into a single vendor. It began life as a Databricks project and now lives under Linux Foundation governance, which is precisely why it has been adopted well beyond Databricks: Snowflake, Iceberg-based lakehouses, and SAP itself all speak the same protocol. For SAP Datasphere and SAP Business Data Cloud, Delta Sharing is the bridge that lets a customer's data leave, or enter, the SAP estate without a bespoke integration project. A share is defined once, a recipient is issued scoped, revocable credentials, and from that point on the data moves — or rather, does not move — on demand.

The reason this matters commercially as much as technically: most cross-organisation and cross-platform data exchange used to require either a point-to-point extraction pipeline, a VPN tunnel into a shared database, or a manually refreshed file drop. All three carry ongoing engineering cost, security surface, and staleness risk. Delta Sharing collapses that into a protocol-level concern — the producer publishes once, and any number of consumers subscribe using whatever tool they already run.

Why it matters

• Zero-copy sharing means data moves only at query time via pre-signed URLs — no ETL pipeline or shared storage negotiation needed for B2B data exchange.
• Client-agnostic consumption (Power BI, Tableau, Spark, pandas can all read a share) means a Datasphere-published share reaches teams on any tool without schema drift.
• Credential-scoped, revocable access lets a producer share with one named recipient and cut access instantly — a governance lever a generic file export can't match.

Key points

• Open Linux-Foundation protocol; Datasphere is producer + consumer; cross-cloud + cross-tool.
• Three layers: share definition · recipient credentials · pre-signed file URLs (zero-copy).
• DAC propagates from Catalog onto shares automatically — moat vs Snowflake/Databricks where re-implemented.
• Producer-side: zero compute impact; consumers read object store directly.
• Four use cases: B2B exchange · marketplace consumption · cross-tool interop · multi-region replication-light.
• Replicate-vs-share threshold: ~100 GB/partner-month; below shares win on TCO, above replicate.
• Token rotation quarterly default, monthly for regulated industries; SIEM wiring mandatory for audit.
• Schema-narrowing or column removal = contract change; backwards-compatible changes non-breaking.

Terms used on this page

Delta Sharing

Open protocol for sharing Delta tables across orgs and tools. Linux Foundation OSS, Databricks-authored.

Share definition

Named bundle of tables a producer makes available, with column-projection and row-filter options.

Recipient credential

Token-protected URL the producer issues to a specific consumer organisation. Bearer-token semantics.

Pre-signed URL

Time-limited URL pointing directly to Delta files in producer object store. Consumer reads bytes without producer compute.

Zero-copy share

Consumer reads producer-stored files at query time; no replication or pre-staging required.

Recipient lifecycle

Provision → rotate → audit → revoke flow per partner relationship.

Time-travel query

Point-in-time read of a shared table at a specific version, for audit reproducibility.

Iceberg sharing

Apache OSS alternative protocol; semantically similar to Delta Sharing. Preview in Datasphere 2026.

Sources

1. Delta Sharing protocol — Linux Foundation
2. SAP Datasphere — Delta Sharing producer + consumer
3. Databricks Marketplace + Delta Sharing
4. AWS Data Exchange + Delta Sharing
5. Delta Lake (Linux Foundation) — Read Delta Sharing Tables, official documentation
6. GitHub delta-io/delta-sharing — open protocol for secure data sharing
7. GitHub delta-io/delta-sharing — PROTOCOL.md, the Delta Sharing REST protocol specification
8. Databricks Docs — Share data using Delta Sharing (open sharing)
9. AWS Open Source Blog — Delta Sharing on AWS
10. Delta Lake Blog — Open source self-hosted Delta Sharing server (2023, still the reference architecture)
11. SAP Community — How to provision SAP BDC Connect for Databricks
12. SAP — SAP Datasphere product page