Thoughts on adding read_delta to pandas

[MrPowers]

There is an open pandas issue on Delta Lake file format support.

@houqp made this suggestion in the thread:

Perhaps we could add https://pypi.org/project/deltalake/ as an optional extra dependency to pandas itself to make deltalake support work out of the box for pandas users?

pandas already has read_csv, read_excel, read_parquet, etc., so read_delta would be a natural fit.

Some thoughts to brainstorm as a team:

• would adding read_delta to pandas be a good idea? I certainly think so, but interested if there are any objections
• Is read_delta a good method name or perhaps read_deltalake?
• What method signature would we need? We'd at least need an optional version keyword argument for time travel 😎

[fvaleye]

A Pull Request has been submitted to integrate directly deltalake in the code base as an optional external dependency.

[fvaleye]

Closing this, based on the response from pandas core devs in pandas-dev/pandas#49692