Managing Tables with Delta Lake

Describe how Delta Lake provides reliability and performance with ACID transactions, time travel, and schema enforcement.

Differentiate between managed and external tables in terms of data lifecycle and location.

Create and drop managed and external Delta tables using SQL.

Perform INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations to manipulate data in Delta tables.

Use the MERGE statement to perform upsert (update/insert) operations on Delta tables.

Query previous versions of a Delta table using time travel and `DESCRIBE HISTORY`.

Inspect the Delta Lake transaction log to understand how table versions are recorded.

Compact small files using OPTIMIZE and remove old files using VACUUM.