Writing to S3 with a locking provider

Delta lake guarantees ACID transactions when writing data. This is done by default when writing to all supported object stores except AWS S3. (Some S3 clients like CloudFlare R2 or MinIO may enable concurrent writing without a locking provider, refer to this section for more information).

When writing to S3, delta-rs provides a locking mechanism to ensure that concurrent writes are safe. This is done by default when writing to S3, but you can opt-out by setting the AWS_S3_ALLOW_UNSAFE_RENAME variable to true.

To enable safe concurrent writes to AWS S3, we must provide an external locking mechanism.

DynamoDB

DynamoDB is the only available locking provider at the moment in delta-rs. To enable DynamoDB as the locking provider, you need to set the AWS_S3_LOCKING_PROVIDER to 'dynamodb' as a storage_options or as an environment variable.

Additionally, you must create a DynamoDB table with the name delta_log so that it can be automatically recognized by delta-rs. Alternatively, you can use a table name of your choice, but you must set the DELTA_DYNAMO_TABLE_NAME variable to match your chosen table name. The required schema for the DynamoDB table is as follows:

"Table": {
    "AttributeDefinitions": [
        {
            "AttributeName": "fileName",
            "AttributeType": "S"
        },
        {
            "AttributeName": "tablePath",
            "AttributeType": "S"
        }
    ],
    "TableName": "delta_log",
    "KeySchema": [
        {
            "AttributeName": "tablePath",
            "KeyType": "HASH"
        },
        {
            "AttributeName": "fileName",
            "KeyType": "RANGE"
        }
    ],
}

Here is an example writing to s3 using this mechanism:

from deltalake import write_deltalake
df = pd.DataFrame({'x': [1, 2, 3]})
storage_options = {
    'AWS_S3_LOCKING_PROVIDER': 'dynamodb',
    'DELTA_DYNAMO_TABLE_NAME': 'custom_table_name'
}
write_deltalake(
    's3a://path/to/table',
    df,
    storage_options=storage_options
)

This locking mechanism is compatible with the one used by Apache Spark. The tablePath property, denoting the root url of the delta table itself, is part of the primary key, and all writers intending to write to the same table must match this property precisely. In Spark, S3 URLs are prefixed with s3a://, and a table in delta-rs must be configured accordingly.

Note that delta-rs does not read credentials from your local .aws/config or .aws/creds file. Credentials can be accessed from environment variables, ec2 metadata, profiles or web identity. You can pass credentials to storage_options using AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY.

The following code allows creating the necessary DynamoDB table from the AWS cli:

aws dynamodb create-table \
--table-name delta_log \
--attribute-definitions AttributeName=tablePath,AttributeType=S AttributeName=fileName,AttributeType=S \
--key-schema AttributeName=tablePath,KeyType=HASH AttributeName=fileName,KeyType=RANGE \
--provisioned-throughput ReadCapacityUnits=5,WriteCapacityUnits=5

You can find additional information in the Delta Lake documentation, which also includes recommendations on configuring a time-to-live (TTL) for the table to avoid growing the table indefinitely.

Enable unsafe writes in S3 (opt-in)

If for some reason you don't want to use dynamodb as your locking mechanism you can choose to set the AWS_S3_ALLOW_UNSAFE_RENAME variable to true in order to enable S3 unsafe writes.

Required permissions

You need to have permissions to get, put and delete objects in the S3 bucket you're storing your data in. Please note that you must be allowed to delete objects even if you're just appending to the deltalake, because there are temporary files into the log folder that are deleted after usage.

In AWS, those would be the required permissions:

• s3:GetObject
• s3:PutObject
• s3:DeleteObject

In DynamoDB, you need those permissions:

• dynamodb:GetItem
• dynamodb:Query
• dynamodb:PutItem
• dynamodb:UpdateItem
• dynamodb:DeleteItem

Enabling concurrent writes for alternative clients

Unlike AWS S3, some S3 clients support atomic renames by passing some headers in requests.

For CloudFlare R2 or Minio passing this in the storage_options will enable concurrent writes:

storage_options = {
    "conditional_put": "etag",
}