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

Organizing data on the Lakehouse

In this section, we will discuss the architectural components of a traditional data warehousing infrastructure/system and how these components can be designed and implemented on the Lakehouse. This is particularly interesting because, as we learned in Chapter 8, The Delta Lake, there is a single data layer on the Lakehouse known as Delta Lake. It does not have purpose-built database-like components that can be used for data warehousing components such as the operational data store or data marts.

Let’s start with a brief overview of the components of a generic data warehousing system implementation.

Components of a warehouse system

The following diagram shows the various components of a generic data warehouse system:

Figure 10.1 – Data warehouse infrastructure components

The data that is captured from source data systems enters the data warehousing system at the staging area. The data in the staging area...