In Databricks and Delta Lake, transactions are indeed ACID-compliant, but this compliance is limited to single table transactions. Delta Lake does not inherently enforce foreign key constraints, which are a staple in relational database systems for maintaining referential integrity between tables. This means that when migrating workloads from a relational database system to Databricks Lakehouse, engineers need to reconsider how to maintain data integrity and relationships that were previously enforced by foreign key constraints.
Unlike traditional relational databases where foreign key constraints help in maintaining the consistency across tables, in Databricks Lakehouse, the data engineer has to manage data consistency and integrity at the application level or through careful design of ETL processes.References:
* Databricks Documentation on Delta Lake: Delta Lake Guide
* Databricks Documentation on ACID Transactions in Delta Lake: ACID Transactions in Delta Lake