What are the other alternatives for data lakes that can be used (both open source and close)?
What these products do is make it as easy to use decoupled storage and compute as your analytics system as it would be to use a fully managed analytics DBMS system.
Or https://iceberg.apache.org/
Which both keep track of data versioning and management of file based datasets on object stores.
Most people today have very ad how approaches to handling data versioning and lineage on Hadoop datasets.
https://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP3/HDP-3.1.0/usi...
Delta here is adding features more closely associated with RDBMS or MPP data warehouses to the Spark data pipelines with parquet data on object stores big data world.