Add load_delta support with deltalake package

[ion-elgreco]

Willingness to contribute

Yes. I can contribute this feature independently.

Proposal Summary

Load_delta should be added using the deltalake library. I am happy to contribute this myself since I work on delta-rs project.

Load delta should return Polars or pandas datasets, and Polars should be added as optional dependency.

Motivation

What is the use case for this feature?

Spark-delta is way to heavy for most usecases, hence the popularity of Python deltalake.

Why is this use case valuable to support for MLflow users in general?

Support for single node ML usecases with Polars pipelines and deltalake as storage layer.

Why is this use case valuable to support for your project(s) or organization?

Would prevent going through pandas to interact with mlflow, improve tracking of deltalake table inputs.

Why is it currently difficult to achieve this use case?

Details

No response

What component(s) does this bug affect?

• area/artifacts: Artifact stores and artifact logging
• area/build: Build and test infrastructure for MLflow
• area/deployments: MLflow Deployments client APIs, server, and third-party Deployments integrations
• area/docs: MLflow documentation pages
• area/examples: Example code
• area/model-registry: Model Registry service, APIs, and the fluent client calls for Model Registry
• area/models: MLmodel format, model serialization/deserialization, flavors
• area/recipes: Recipes, Recipe APIs, Recipe configs, Recipe Templates
• area/projects: MLproject format, project running backends
• area/scoring: MLflow Model server, model deployment tools, Spark UDFs
• area/server-infra: MLflow Tracking server backend
• area/tracking: Tracking Service, tracking client APIs, autologging

What interface(s) does this bug affect?

• area/uiux: Front-end, user experience, plotting, JavaScript, JavaScript dev server
• area/docker: Docker use across MLflow's components, such as MLflow Projects and MLflow Models
• area/sqlalchemy: Use of SQLAlchemy in the Tracking Service or Model Registry
• area/windows: Windows support

What language(s) does this bug affect?

• language/r: R APIs and clients
• language/java: Java APIs and clients
• language/new: Proposals for new client languages

What integration(s) does this bug affect?

• integrations/azure: Azure and Azure ML integrations
• integrations/sagemaker: SageMaker integrations
• integrations/databricks: Databricks integrations

[ion-elgreco]

I can add load_polars and load_pandas on classmlflow.data.delta_dataset_source.DeltaDatasetSource

[github-actions]

@mlflow/mlflow-team Please assign a maintainer and start triaging this issue.