insights/rust/deltalite

deltalite

Streaming partition-level upsert for Delta tables, replacing delta-rs's SQL MERGE for the warehouse-sync incremental path. delta-rs stays the storage and protocol layer (log, checkpoints, Parquet writing, Add-action statistics, S3 conditional-put commits, conflict resolution); only the merge execution is replaced.

Why: MERGE executes a DataFusion hash join whose memory scales with the scanned target and which deadlocks under a bounded memory pool (delta-io/delta-rs#4614, reproduced). deltalite builds a PK hash set over the (small) source, streams the (large) target one row group at a time, drops replaced rows, writes survivors plus the source rows, and commits every partition in ONE atomic commit. Peak memory is bounded by the source and the concurrency knobs — never by table size. The validation spike measured memory flat from 62k to 1M-row partitions, ~4x below MERGE, at matching write volume via exact content-based file selection; the semantics are proven by the differential parity suite in python/tests/.

Layout — and why it is two crates

Path	What
core/	deltalite-core: all the logic (upsert pipeline, PK set, pruning/probing, schema casting, decimal realignment, process-global limits, multipart store). Pure Rust, no pyo3. Workspace member — normal CI (build, nextest, clippy, fmt) applies. All Rust unit tests live here.
python/	deltalite-python: thin pyo3 binding, built by maturin, imported as deltalite. Workspace member shaped like rust/insightsql/parser (cdylib+rlib, extension-module, abi3-py312) — no Rust tests, see below.
python/tests/	The differential parity suite plus probe/operations/types/crash-redelivery/interop/planner/guard tests (pytest, 159 tests). Runs the same batch sequences through real delta-rs merge and through deltalite.upsert and asserts identical logical content.
python/harness/	The two write paths + logical comparison used by the tests. merge_path is a faithful transcription of the production incremental branch of DeltaTableHelper.write_to_deltalake.
python/deltalite_planner.py	Rough knob tuning: given concurrent upserts and pod memory, suggests starting values for max_parallel_partitions / max_parallel_files / the byte budget and the process-global env ceilings. A heuristic, not a capacity model.

Two crates because pyo3's extension-module feature suppresses the libpython link, so a cargo test harness binary for an extension crate cannot link on Linux. insightsql/parser sidesteps this by having no Rust tests; deltalite needs Rust unit tests for its pure logic, so the logic lives in a pyo3-free crate and the binding crate stays test-free.

Related constraint: cargo permits only one pyo3 version per dependency graph (pyo3 has links = "python"). deltalite's pyarrow ingest uses arrow 58's pyarrow feature (arrow major fixed by deltalake 0.32), which requires pyo3 0.28 — so rust/insightsql/parser was migrated from pyo3 0.22 to 0.28 to share the workspace, and the two must bump pyo3 in lockstep from here on.

deltalite-core pins deltalake = "=0.32.4" — the newest published crates.io release, deliberately NOT "the same delta-rs as the Python package" (that tree is unbuildable as published: it pins a moving git branch and ships no lockfile — see the comment in core/Cargo.toml). The parity suite, not version equality, is the compatibility check; every bump of either side must keep it green.

Building locally

# Editable install of the extension into the active venv:
uv pip install -e rust/deltalite/python

# Or via maturin directly (faster incremental):
maturin develop --release --manifest-path rust/deltalite/python/Cargo.toml

# Sanity check
python -c "import deltalite; print(deltalite.DeltaLiteTable)"

# Rust unit tests / lints (workspace tooling covers core):
cd rust && cargo test -p deltalite-core && cargo clippy -p deltalite-core --all-targets

# Note for non-flox shells on macOS: rust/.cargo/config.toml adds -fuse-ld=lld,
# which only exists inside the flox env. Outside it, override with
#   RUSTFLAGS="--cfg tokio_unstable" cargo <cmd>

The Python test suite (needs deltalake, pyarrow, duckdb, pytest — versions matching the repo's pyproject.toml pins):

uv venv /tmp/deltalite-venv --python 3.13
VIRTUAL_ENV=/tmp/deltalite-venv uv pip install maturin pytest \
    'deltalake==1.6.1' 'pyarrow==23.0.1' 'duckdb~=1.5.2'
VIRTUAL_ENV=/tmp/deltalite-venv /tmp/deltalite-venv/bin/python -m maturin develop \
    --release --manifest-path rust/deltalite/python/Cargo.toml
/tmp/deltalite-venv/bin/python -m pytest rust/deltalite/python/tests -q

CI runs exactly this in .github/workflows/ci-deltalite-python.yml, path-filtered to rust/deltalite/**.

How the wheel is built and consumed

Mirrors insightsql-parser-rs (see .github/workflows/build-insightsql-parser-rs.yml):

• maturin builds a single cp312-abi3 wheel per platform that works on every Python 3.12+ (including the pinned prod 3.13). [project] name = "deltalite", module name deltalite.
• When a release is cut, a build-deltalite workflow (to be cloned from build-insightsql-parser-rs.yml at rollout time: version-bump detection on rust/deltalite/python/**, maturin-action wheel matrix for manylinux 2_28 + musllinux x86_64/aarch64 and macOS arm64/x86_64, publish, then a follow-up PR pinning deltalite==<version> in pyproject.toml) publishes it; the insights image then installs it like any other wheel via uv sync — no Rust toolchain in the image.
• Version lives in BOTH python/Cargo.toml and python/pyproject.toml (always identical); bump both together.

Until that workflow lands, the wheel is dev-installed as above; nothing in the Django app imports deltalite yet (the DeltaTableHelper seam is a separate, flag-gated change).

Operational knobs

Per-call (arguments to DeltaLiteTable.upsert): max_parallel_partitions (2), max_parallel_files (4), max_buffered_bytes (64 MiB), prune_strategy (probe), probe_concurrency (8), read_batch_size (8192), target_file_size (table's delta.targetFileSize, else delta-rs's 100 MiB), max_source_bytes (2 GiB guard), multipart_threshold (64 MiB) / multipart_part_size (16 MiB), commit_max_retries (15).

Process-global (environment, enforced on top of the per-call knobs so that ~15 concurrent upsert threads in one Temporal worker cannot multiply the budgets): DELTALITE_PROCESS_MAX_PARALLEL_PARTITIONS (8), DELTALITE_PROCESS_MAX_PARALLEL_FILES (16), DELTALITE_PROCESS_MAX_BUFFERED_BYTES (256 MiB), DELTALITE_MAX_SOURCE_BYTES, DELTALITE_MULTIPART_THRESHOLD_BYTES, DELTALITE_MULTIPART_PART_SIZE_BYTES.

For a rough starting point on a given pod, python/deltalite_planner.py suggests knob values from concurrency + pod memory, e.g. python deltalite_planner.py 15 8000 --source-mb 250.

Metrics (metrics crate, static labels only): deltalite_upserts_total (outcome, prune_strategy, error_kind), deltalite_upsert_duration_seconds, deltalite_files_{added,removed,carried_over,probed}_total, deltalite_rows_{updated,inserted,copied}_total.

Pre-rollout conditions (from the spike verdict, still open)

• Verify against real AWS S3 (spike verified MinIO/SeaweedFS only).
• Gate rollout on a conditional-put startup probe: an endpoint that silently ignores If-None-Match: * loses concurrent commits with no error anywhere.
• Adopt a vacuum(full=True) policy where deltalite ships: lite vacuum never reclaims crash orphans, and a late crash orphans a whole batch's files.
• Check rollout tables for pre-existing duplicate-key batches: deltalite rejects duplicate source PKs that MERGE silently double-inserts.