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

Discussing the Photon product roadmap

Photon is a brand-new query engine. As we saw in the previous section, it must implement vectorized kernels for all operations that are possible in Apache Spark. At the time of writing, there are still a few operations that are not available with Photon:

  • Photon Scan and Write operators work with Delta and Parquet files only
  • Window and Sort operations are not yet supported
  • User-defined functions are not yet supported
  • Spark Structured Streaming is not yet supported

Work is in progress on all of these and I recommend that you visit https://docs.databricks.com/runtime/photon.html#limitations for the latest status.

That said, does this mean that you cannot use Window and Sort operations with Databricks SQL or that you cannot use your own user-defined functions in Databricks SQL?

You can! Recall Figure 9.3. It shows that the tasks scheduled by Spark are executed by Photon or JVM-Core as applicable. If an operation is...