Vortex is a file format, where as delta lake and iceberg are table formats. it should be compared to Parquet rather than delta lake and iceberg.
This guest lecture by a maintainer of Vortex provides a good overview of the file format, motivations for its creation and its key features.
I think it would still make sense to compare with those table formats, or is the idea that you would only use this if you could not use a table format?
Vortex is, roughly, how you save data to files and Iceberg is the database-like manager of those files. You’ll soon be able to run Iceberg using Vortex because they are complementary, not competing, technologies.
There are other formats though that it can be compared to.
The Lance columnar format is one: https://github.com/lancedb/lancedb
And Nimble from Meta is another: https://github.com/facebookincubator/nimble
Parquet is so core to data infra and widespread, that removing it from its throne is a really really hard task.
The people behind these projects that are willing to try and do this, have my total respect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyn_T5uragA
Vortex is, roughly, how you save data to files and Iceberg is the database-like manager of those files. You’ll soon be able to run Iceberg using Vortex because they are complementary, not competing, technologies.