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 Databricks Product Suite – A Visual Tour

The Databricks Lakehouse platform is an expansive product that caters to personas such as data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts. It also caters to administrator personas such as platform administrators and database administrators. As we discuss core concepts in subsequent chapters, we will have to refer to other persona-specific features. Familiarity with the platform will allow us to navigate to the correct feature or function when referred.

In this chapter, we will take a visual tour of the Databricks Lakehouse platform, with an emphasis on the Databricks SQL product. We will use the official Lakehouse infographic from Figure 1.3 as our guiding light to navigate through the Databricks Lakehouse platform and introduce, at a very high level, the features and functionalities and how they fit together.

We will use screenshots throughout, and you are encouraged to navigate accordingly in your instance of Databricks...