What feature of Delta Lake allows retrieval of data from previous versions of a table?

The feature of Delta Lake that allows for the retrieval of data from previous versions of a table is known as Time Travel. This capability is a powerful attribute of Delta Lake that enables users to query snapshots of data at different points in time, which is especially useful for auditing, rollback scenarios, or analyzing data as it existed at a previous moment.

Time Travel works by maintaining a history of all changes made to a Delta table, thus allowing users to access earlier states of the data using simple SQL commands. This functionality helps in scenarios where data might have been processed incorrectly or requires validation against previous versions, allowing analysts and data engineers to seamlessly revert to an earlier state without complex data recovery procedures.

While other options like Spark Structured Streaming refer to the capabilities of handling real-time data streams, Catalog Tables are related to the organization and metadata storage of tables, and Data Sharding involves partitioning a dataset to improve performance, these concepts do not provide historical data retrieval as effectively as Time Travel does.