Book Image

Business Intelligence with Databricks SQL

By : Vihag Gupta
Book Image

Business Intelligence with Databricks SQL

By: Vihag Gupta

Overview of this book

In this new era of data platform system design, data lakes and data warehouses are giving way to the lakehouse – a new type of data platform system that aims to unify all data analytics into a single platform. Databricks, with its Databricks SQL product suite, is the hottest lakehouse platform out there, harnessing the power of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and other innovations to enable data warehousing capabilities on the lakehouse with data lake economics. This book is a comprehensive hands-on guide that helps you explore all the advanced features, use cases, and technology components of Databricks SQL. You’ll start with the lakehouse architecture fundamentals and understand how Databricks SQL fits into it. The book then shows you how to use the platform, from exploring data, executing queries, building reports, and using dashboards through to learning the administrative aspects of the lakehouse – data security, governance, and management of the computational power of the lakehouse. You’ll also delve into the core technology enablers of Databricks SQL – Delta Lake and Photon. Finally, you’ll get hands-on with advanced SQL commands for ingesting data and maintaining the lakehouse. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered Databricks SQL and be able to deploy and deliver fast, scalable business intelligence on the lakehouse.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Databricks SQL on the Lakehouse
9
Part 2: Internals of Databricks SQL
13
Part 3: Databricks SQL Commands
16
Part 4: TPC-DS, Experiments, and Frequently Asked Questions

The Delta Lake

Up until this chapter, we were singularly focused on enabling you to use Databricks SQL. Now that we have accomplished that, let’s investigate the technologies that enable Databricks SQL to run your data warehousing workloads on what seems to be a data lake.

In this chapter, we will focus on the primary storage format of the Databricks Lakehouse —Delta Lake. Why should you care? You should care because, unlike other cloud data warehouses, the Databricks Lakehouse stores data in open storage formats such as Delta Lake, Parquet, Optimized Row Columnar (ORC), comma-separated values (CSV), and so on, instead of proprietary formats.

We will begin by understanding the challenges posed by using other storage formats, how they affect the business intelligence (BI) experience on traditional data lakes, and how the Delta Lake format addresses them. Then, we will learn about the performance boosters available with Delta Lake in Databricks.

The primary audience...