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

Understanding the TPC-DS dataset

Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC®) is a non-profit corporation and a worldwide consortium. It was founded in 1985 and has major hardware and software vendors as full-time members.

Their mission is two-fold:

  • Develop data-centric benchmark standards for various systems.
  • Disseminate objective, verifiable benchmarking data to the industry.

TPC-DS (https://www.tpc.org/tpcds/) stands for Transaction Processing Performance Council – Decision Support. It is a benchmarking standard for creating verifiable, objective performance data about decision support systems (DSSs).

DSSs are software systems that sift and analyze massive amounts of data and can compile comprehensive information that can be used in decision-making. For example, a DSS can compile projected revenue or inventory management information for an enterprise operation.

TPC-DS consists of two things of interest to us:

  • A software that allows...