What is the best description of Delta Lake?

Delta Lake is best described as a relational storage layer for Spark that supports tables based on Parquet files. It enhances the capabilities of Apache Spark by providing ACID transactions, scalable metadata handling, and unifying streaming and batch data processing. This means that users can have a reliable and performant way to manage their data in Spark, leveraging the efficient storage format of Parquet while also benefiting from features like time travel and schema enforcement.

This option highlights the essential aspect of Delta Lake as it builds on top of the existing data ecosystem, allowing for robust data manipulation and querying while maintaining the performance optimizations provided by the Parquet format. The integration with Spark allows for powerful analytics and data processing workflows, making Delta Lake a foundational component for modern data architectures.