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

Fundamentals of the Delta Lake storage format

In this section, we will learn about the Delta Lake storage format and its core objectives. To do so, we will first detour into the realm of data engineering, which will provide the context for the core objectives. Finally, we will see how the Delta Lake format achieves the core objectives and simplifies the data engineering process.

Delta Lake (https://delta.io/) is an open source storage format that enables an organization’s data engineering teams to build the Lakehouse (see Chapter 1, Introduction to Databricks). Delta Lake aims to bring the following data warehousing characteristics to your data lake:

  • Reliability
  • Simplicity
  • Performance
  • Governance

To understand why this is a big deal, we must understand how data engineering on data lakes is currently done, how it affects BI users, and why these characteristics are the holy grail for data engineering teams.

Data engineering before Delta Lake

...