What is Data Bricks?
Databricks is a unified, open analytics platform for building, deploying, sharing, and maintaining enterprise-grade data, analytics, and AI solutions at scale. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform integrates with cloud storage and security in your cloud account, and manages and deploys cloud infrastructure on your behalf.
How does a data intelligence platform work?
Databricks uses generative AI with the data lakehouse to understand the unique semantics of your data. Then, it automatically optimizes performance and manages infrastructure to match your business needs.
Natural language processing learns your business’s language, so you can search and discover data by asking a question in your own words. Natural language assistance helps you write code, troubleshoot errors, and find answers in documentation.
Finally, your data and AI applications can rely on strong governance and security. You can integrate APIs such as OpenAI without compromising data privacy and IP control.
What is Databricks used for?
Databricks provides tools that help you connect your sources of data to one platform to process, store, share, analyze, model, and monetize datasets with solutions from BI to generative AI.
The Databricks workspace provides a unified interface and tools for most data tasks, including:
- Data processing scheduling and management, in particular ETL
- Generating dashboards and visualizations
- Managing security, governance, high availability, and disaster recovery
- Data discovery, annotation, and exploration
- Machine learning (ML) modeling, tracking, and model serving
- Generative AI solutions
Managed integration with open source
Databricks has a strong commitment to the open source community. Databricks manages updates of open source integrations in the Databricks Runtime releases. The following technologies are open source projects originally created by Databricks employees:
In addition to the workspace UI, you can interact with Databricks programmatically with the following tools:
- REST API
- CLI
- Terraform
How does Databricks work with AWS?
The Databricks platform architecture comprises two primary parts:
- The infrastructure used by Databricks to deploy, configure, and manage the platform and services.
- The customer-owned infrastructure managed in collaboration by Databricks and your company.
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Unlike many enterprise data companies, Databricks does not force you to migrate your data into proprietary storage systems to use the platform. Instead, you configure a Databricks workspace by configuring secure integrations between the Databricks platform and your cloud account, and then Databricks deploys compute clusters using cloud resources in your account to process and store data in object storage and other integrated services you control.
Unity Catalog further extends this relationship, allowing you to manage permissions for accessing data using familiar SQL syntax from within Databricks.
Databricks workspaces meet the security and networking requirements of some of the world’s largest and most security-minded companies. Databricks makes it easy for new users to get started on the platform. It removes many of the burdens and concerns of working with cloud infrastructure, without limiting the customizations and control experienced data, operations, and security teams require.
What are common use cases for Databricks?
Use cases on Databricks are as varied as the data processed on the platform and the many personas of employees that work with data as a core part of their job. The following use cases highlight how users throughout your organization can leverage Databricks to accomplish tasks essential to processing, storing, and analyzing the data that drives critical business functions and decisions.
Build an enterprise data lakehouse
The data lakehouse combines the strengths of enterprise data warehouses and data lakes to accelerate, simplify, and unify enterprise data solutions. Data engineers, data scientists, analysts, and production systems can all use the data lakehouse as their single source of truth, allowing timely access to consistent data and reducing the complexities of building, maintaining, and syncing many distributed data systems. See What is a data lakehouse?.
ETL and data engineering
Whether you’re generating dashboards or powering artificial intelligence applications, data engineering provides the backbone for data-centric companies by making sure data is available, clean, and stored in data models that allow for efficient discovery and use. Databricks combines the power of Apache Spark with Delta Lake and custom tools to provide an unrivaled ETL (extract, transform, load) experience. You can use SQL, Python, and Scala to compose ETL logic and then orchestrate scheduled job deployment with just a few clicks.
Delta Live Tables simplifies ETL even further by intelligently managing dependencies between datasets and automatically deploying and scaling production infrastructure to ensure timely and accurate delivery of data per your specifications.
Databricks provides a number of custom tools for data ingestion, including Auto Loader, an efficient and scalable tool for incrementally and idempotently loading data from cloud object storage and data lakes into the data lakehouse.
Machine learning, AI, and data science
Databricks machine learning expands the core functionality of the platform with a suite of tools tailored to the needs of data scientists and ML engineers, including MLflow and Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning.
Large language models and generative AI
Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning includes libraries like Hugging Face Transformers that allow you to integrate existing pre-trained models or other open-source libraries into your workflow. The Databricks MLflow integration makes it easy to use the MLflow tracking service with transformer pipelines, models, and processing components. In addition, you can integrate OpenAI models or solutions from partners like John Snow Labs in your Databricks workflows.
With Databricks, you can customize a LLM on your data for your specific task. With the support of open source tooling, such as Hugging Face and DeepSpeed, you can efficiently take a foundation LLM and start training with your own data to have more accuracy for your domain and workload.
In addition, Databricks provides AI functions that SQL data analysts can use to access LLM models, including from OpenAI, directly within their data pipelines and workflows. See AI Functions on Databricks.