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# Delta Lake 1.2 - More Speed, Efficiency and Extensibility Than Ever

**[Delta Lake Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/delta-lake)** · 9 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Delta Lake 1.2 ships on Apache Spark 3.2 with performance and efficiency features including small file compaction (optimize), automatic data skipping via column min/max statistics, and support for generated columns. S3 multi-cluster write support is added, using DynamoDB internally to provide mutual exclusion since S3 lacks it natively (previously writes were restricted to a single Spark driver). User-facing additions include RESTORE for reverting a table to an earlier version, schema evolution via RENAME COLUMN with column mapping enabled, and support for arbitrary characters (including spaces) in column names. New third-party integrations cover Apache Flink, Presto, and Trino, and a new open-source benchmarking framework for running TPC-DS benchmarks on Spark/EMR was also included.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://delta.io/blog/2022-05-05-delta-lake-1-2-released>

## Questions this post answers

### Does Delta Lake 1.2 support writing to S3 from multiple clusters at once?

Yes, Delta Lake 1.2 adds multi-cluster write support for S3, in addition to the existing single-cluster mode. Because S3 lacks native mutual exclusion, multi-cluster mode uses DynamoDB internally so concurrent writers commit metadata to a DynamoDB table before writing to S3. This mode must be enabled explicitly; previously S3 writes were restricted to a single Spark driver.

_Teams scaling multi-cluster Spark pipelines can follow storage-layer changes like this via daily.dev._

### How do I rename a column in a Delta Lake table without rewriting all the data?

As of Delta Lake 1.2, you can rename columns without rewriting existing data by first enabling column mapping on the table, then running a RENAME COLUMN command in SQL. Column mapping also enables support for arbitrary characters, including spaces and symbols like ,;{}()\n\t=, in column names, which was previously limited by Parquet's character restrictions.

_Developers evolving Delta table schemas can track feature updates like column mapping through daily.dev._

### How does Delta Lake's RESTORE command work to revert a table to an earlier version?

The RESTORE command reverts a Delta table to an earlier state using either a version number or a timestamp of when that state existed, since Delta tables internally maintain historic versions. Running the history operation after a restore returns operation metrics giving visibility into what changed, useful for recovering from accidental bad writes or deletes.

_Engineers building recovery workflows for data pipelines can follow tooling like this on daily.dev._

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---

Tags: [#data-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/data-engineering), [#apache-spark](https://daily.dev/tags/apache-spark), [#aws-s3](https://daily.dev/tags/aws-s3), [#apache-flink](https://daily.dev/tags/apache-flink)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/delta-lake-1-2---more-speed-efficiency-and-extensibility-than-ever-5jmlcjzat)

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