Confluent, Inc. (Nasdaq: CFLT), the data streaming pioneer, has announced the General Availability of Delta Lake and Databricks Unity Catalog integrations in Confluent Tableflow, along with Early Access availability on Microsoft OneLake. These updates position Tableflow as a fully managed, end-to-end solution that seamlessly connects operational, analytical, and artificial intelligence systems across hybrid and multicloud environments. The new capabilities allow Confluent to move Apache Kafka® topics directly into Delta Lake or Apache Iceberg™ tables with automated data quality controls, catalog synchronization, and enterprise-grade security. This eliminates the need for fragile ETL processes and manual lakehouse integrations, enabling organizations to make streaming data instantly analytics-ready and AI-ready. Since its launch, Tableflow has helped teams overcome the long-standing friction between real-time data streams and analytical systems. With the latest updates, Confluent is expanding its multicloud reach and delivering a unified, governed data foundation for real-time analytics and AI. Key new features in the General Availability release include: Simplified analytics: Delta Lake support now enables direct conversion of Kafka topics into Delta Lake tables stored in cloud object storage such as Amazon S3 or Azure Data Lake Storage. Organizations can now enable both Delta Lake and Iceberg formats simultaneously per topic for flexible, cross-format analytics. Unified governance: Unity Catalog integration (GA) automatically synchronizes metadata, schema, and access policies between Tableflow and Databricks Unity Catalog, ensuring consistent data management and centralized governance. Improved reliability: The Dead Letter Queue now captures and isolates malformed records without disrupting data flow, providing transparency, faster recovery, and continuous data quality. Time and complexity savings: Upsert functionality automatically updates and inserts records as data changes, keeping tables consistent, deduplicated, and always ready for analysis without manual intervention. Enhanced security: Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) support extends customer-managed encryption keys to Tableflow, giving full control over data at rest and meeting compliance requirements in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government. These capabilities build on existing features like schema evolution, compaction, automated table maintenance, and integrations with Apache Iceberg, AWS Glue, and Snowflake Open Catalog. Together, they form a robust foundation for organizations needing streaming data to be instantly usable for analytics and AI. David Kinney, Principal Solutions Architect at Attune, highlighted the impact: “With just a few clicks, Tableflow lets us materialize critical Kafka topics into trusted, analytics-ready tables. This gives us real-time visibility into customer engagement and device behavior, powering ML models and generative AI—all on a reliable, governed foundation.” The Early Access release on Microsoft OneLake marks a significant expansion of Tableflow’s multicloud footprint. It enables customers using Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric to stream Kafka events directly into OneLake as Delta Lake or Iceberg tables, and query them instantly using OneLake Table APIs and third-party engines. This reduces complexity and accelerates decision-making. Dipti Borkar, Vice President and GM of Microsoft OneLake and ISV Ecosystem, said: “Access to real-time data is critical for fast, accurate decisions. With Tableflow now available on Azure, customers can stream Kafka data to OneLake and query it immediately, cutting through complexity and speeding up insights.” These advancements reinforce Confluent’s role as a leader in data streaming infrastructure, enabling organizations to build intelligent, real-time data pipelines across cloud environments.