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

Exploring data visually with the Data Catalog

Data Explorer is a feature of Databricks SQL that allows users to visually navigate and explore the data assets that are available in the data catalog.

As we saw in Chapter 2, The Databricks Product Suite – A Visual Tour, we can navigate to Data Explorer by clicking the Data icon, , on the left-hand sidebar.

Data Explorer requires a running SQL Warehouse to be associated with it to be able to display the data catalog. If the associated SQL Warehouse is not running, it will prompt you to start the Warehouse or associate the explorer with a SQL Warehouse that is running.

Note

If you are using Unity Catalog, then a running SQL Warehouse is not required.

The SQL Warehouse association can be controlled using the dropdown highlighted in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.5 – Associating a SQL Warehouse with Data Explorer

At this point, you can create a new SQL Warehouse or use the default...