Data Lake Table Formats Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
Data Lake Table Formats: Who Holds the Patents on Schema Evolution, Time Travel and Metadata Catalogs
47.0% of all 394 records sit with just five assignees, and 63.5% with ten — this field is concentrated at the top, not fragmented. Filings peaked at 69 in 2017, dipped through the early 2020s, then climbed sharply from 19 in 2021 to 63 in 2024 — a 232% increase over that three-year span. The 2025-2026 figures are still incomplete due to publication lag and should not be read as a decline.
- 1ORACLE INT CORP69
- 2INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINE CORPORATION31
- 3SNOWFLAKE INC29
- 4SAP SE28
- 5GOOGLE LLC28
See the full data lake table formats analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about this landscape
Who holds the most patents in data lake table formats?
One assignee leads the ranked list with 69 records, well ahead of the fifth-placed company at 28. The top five assignees together hold 47.0% of all 394 records in scope, and the top ten hold 63.5%, so the field is concentrated among a small group of large software and cloud vendors rather than evenly spread. Below the top ten, the ranking runs to 83 companies in total, most filing in single digits.
Is patent filing activity in data lake table formats growing or slowing?
Filings grew sharply from 19 records in 2021 to 63 in 2024, a 232% increase, tracking the wider adoption of open table formats like Iceberg and Delta Lake in production systems. There was an earlier, separate peak of 69 records in 2017 tied to general data-lake filings. The 2025 and 2026 figures look lower only because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months — they should not be read as a slowdown.
What technical mechanisms do these patents actually claim?
The search covers claims combining core data-lake and table-metadata concepts with specific mechanisms: small file compaction, schema evolution, partition pruning, concurrent writer coordination, time travel querying, and metadata catalog design. These are the specific engineering problems that separate a managed table format from a plain file store, and they are where competing vendors are drawing claim boundaries.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Data Lake Table Formats covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.