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 Photon Engine

In this chapter, we will turn our attention back to SQL Warehouses. This time, however, we will focus on the query engine running on SQL Warehouses. The query engine is known as Photon Engine. We will begin by learning about Photon Engine and its place in the Apache Spark framework. Going ahead, we will understand the core engineering philosophy of Photon Engine. Finally, we will go through its limitations and the roadmap to overcome them.

I do want to highlight that you don’t need to learn the details of Photon Engine to work with Databricks SQL. This chapter is intended for those who are interested in how Databricks SQL achieves record-beating query performances on the Lakehouse setup with open source storage formats.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding Photon Engine
  • Understanding vectorization
  • Discussing the Photon product roadmap