Managing Delta Tables

Vacuuming tables

Vacuuming a table will delete any files that have been marked for deletion. This may make some past versions of a table invalid, so this can break time travel. However, it will save storage space. Vacuum will retain files in a certain window, by default one week, so time travel will still work in shorter ranges.

Delta tables usually don't delete old files automatically, so vacuuming regularly is considered good practice, unless the table is only appended to.

Use DeltaTable.vacuum to perform the vacuum operation. Note that to prevent accidental deletion, the function performs a dry-run by default: it will only list the files to be deleted. Pass dry_run=False to actually delete files.

>>> dt = DeltaTable("../rust/tests/data/simple_table")
>>> dt.vacuum()
['../rust/tests/data/simple_table/part-00006-46f2ff20-eb5d-4dda-8498-7bfb2940713b-c000.snappy.parquet',
 '../rust/tests/data/simple_table/part-00190-8ac0ae67-fb1d-461d-a3d3-8dc112766ff5-c000.snappy.parquet',
 '../rust/tests/data/simple_table/part-00164-bf40481c-4afd-4c02-befa-90f056c2d77a-c000.snappy.parquet',
 ...]
>>> dt.vacuum(dry_run=False) # Don't run this unless you are sure!

Optimizing tables

Optimizing tables is not currently supported.