Databricks has agreed to acquire Tabular, a data management company, for over US$1bn in a significant move towards unifying open data lakehouse formats.

Tabular was founded by the original creators of Apache Iceberg, Ryan Blue, Daniel Weeks, and Jason Reid. The acquisition is expected to close in Databricks’ second fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.

Databricks, a company specialising in Data and AI, has over 10,000 organisations worldwide relying on its Data Intelligence Platform. The company introduced the lakehouse architecture in 2020, integrating traditional data warehousing workloads with AI workloads. This architecture has been adopted by 74% of enterprises.

The open lakehouse, a joint vision of Databricks and Tabular, combines the best of data warehouses and data lakes. Delta Lake and Iceberg have emerged as the two leading open source standards for lakehouse formats. Databricks plans to work with the Delta Lake and Iceberg communities to bring interoperability to the formats over time.

"Databricks pioneered the lakehouse and over the past four years, the world has embraced the lakehouse architecture, combining the best of data warehouses and data lakes to help customers decrease TCO, embrace openness, and deliver on AI projects faster," Co-founder and CEO at Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, said. "Unfortunately, the lakehouse paradigm has been split between the two most popular formats: Delta Lake and Iceberg. Databricks and Tabular will work with the open-source community to bring the two formats closer to each other over time, increasing openness, and reducing silos and friction for customers."

Last year, Databricks introduced Delta Lake Uniform to provide interoperability across Delta Lake, Iceberg, and Hudi. The acquisition of Tabular is expected to further this initiative. Both Databricks and Tabular have a history of championing open source formats.

Co-Founder and CEO at Tabular, Ryan Blue, said Apache Iceberg was created to solve critical data challenges around correctness, performance, and scalability.

"It’s been amazing to see both Iceberg and Delta Lake grow massively in popularity, largely fuelled by the open lakehouse becoming the industry standard. With Tabular joining Databricks, we intend to build the best data management platform based on open lakehouse formats so that companies don’t have to worry about picking the ‘right’ format or getting locked into proprietary data formats," he said.