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

Summary

In this chapter, we dove headfirst into Photon Engine. We discussed the standard Apache Spark execution model and what has made Apache Spark so fast. Then, we discussed the prevalent query engine design models and why the vectorization model was chosen to replace the code generation design of Apache Spark. We learned about the core concept of vectorization and how it enables Photon to be as fast as it is. Finally, we discussed what Photon can and cannot do now and what its known feature roadmap is.

Before we end this chapter, I will provide you with one final reminder – the aim of this chapter is only to give you a conceptual idea of how Photon works and why is it so fast. All the concepts have been simplified for better understanding. To deep dive into the nuances, follow the content in the section Further Reading.

With that, we have a complete understanding of the Databricks SQL toolset and its storage and computation technologies. In the next chapter, we will...