Vol #15 | What is Databricks
The unified Data, Analytics & AI Platform
Hello everyone, I hope you all are having a great time.
In today’s blog, I’ll introduce you all to one of the most talked about platforms in the modern data world - “ Databricks”
What is Databricks?
Databricks is a platform for building your data ecosystems or data landscape. It is a single platform to implement all of your data, analytics, and AI use cases.
You can consider Databricks as one unified platform that can help your data engineers, data analysts, machine learning engineers as well as business users to manage & access data.
What are the benefits?
While there are multiple advantages of using Databricks, I’ve listed the most important ones here.
Founded by the creators of Spark - it has all the power & great features of Spark, which is one of the most adopted big data frameworks across the industries.
Databricks supports lakehouse architecture, so you don’t need to build a separate warehouse.
It can support all your data requirements - BI Reporting, AI/ML workloads, storing structured, semi-structured, unstructured data, and streaming data.
Offers a collaborative approach for development using simple jupyter-style notebooks where developers can work together.
Support for Multicloud - the most important feature. Databricks can work on top of AWS, Azure or GCP. You can migrate from one cloud to another without any major code changes.
Databricks supports delta format (open table formats) for implementing lakehouse.
What are the use cases?
If you are looking for a unified platform to build your data ecosystems, then Databricks can be your top choice.
Databricks suits below use cases
Streaming or real-time workloads.
Implementing a single platform for BI & AI workloads.
Suitable for enterprises that have a multi-cloud strategy.
Lakehouse implementations.
For Azure-based implementations as Databricks is a first-party service within Azure
Where can you get more info?
If you want to dive deeper into Databricks, you can refer below.
Databricks Community Edition - A lifetime free cluster for data engineers to explore various (limited) Databricks features.
Databricks Youtube Channel - Channel by Databricks where all the recent feature updates, Summit/Conference videos, and Tech deep dive talks are uploaded frequently.
Many other individuals have a lot of great content on youtube for Databricks, where they have created complete series. Some of these that I often refer to are listed below.
Advancing Analytics - To understand the concepts & latest features.
WafaStudies - Hands-on step-by-step tutorials.
CloudFitness - Hands-on step-by-step tutorials
Summary
Databricks is a great platform to explore, learn & understand if you are working or aspiring to get into the “data” world. With its current support for Lakehouse & many new features, it’s one of the best platforms in the market for implementing lakehouses.
I hope that this blog helps you to get started with Databricks. I’ll try to write more about some of the other Databricks concepts in future blogs.
Upcoming Summits
I just got to know about another data summit happening in September. Details in below tweet. Go check it out!
