Sharing large datasets securely with external partners is a major challenge in modern data engineering. Legacy methods such as transferring files via SFTP or HTTP and building custom APIs often create brittle pipelines that are hard to scale and govern. Many organizations have historically used on-prem or cloud SFTP servers or custom REST endpoints to exchange CSV/Parquet files. These approaches work in a pinch but require copying or exporting data, scheduling processes and managing credentials. As Databricks observes, homegrown SFTP and API solutions have become difficult to manage, maintain or scale. Traditional data warehouses add another option but that typically locks you into one vendor and incurs extra licensing and data copy overhead.
In contrast, Databricks Delta Sharing is a new open protocol designed for secure, real-time data sharing across organizations and platforms. The core idea is simple data providers register a share of live Delta tables and recipients connect directly to query that data in place. No ETL or manual file export is needed. A built-in Delta Sharing server handles authentication, governance and data serving. The Delta Sharing API is a lightweight REST service effectively a simple REST protocol that supports sharing live data in a Delta Lake between providers and recipients.
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