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 internals of cloud storage access

In Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2, we discussed the execution model of a query. In the preceding section on user-facing table access control, we learned how table access control enables user-facing table access control.

This leaves us with one more authorization layer to discuss – the cloud storage access that’s given to SQL Warehouses.

Unity Catalog Consideration

If you are using Unity Catalog, or exclusively using managed tables, this section is not relevant. This is because with managed tables, the catalog stores the data in a location dedicated for its use. Further, with Unity Catalog, the query engine is provided signed, short-lived, pre-signed URLs to the relevant data files, even if the tables are unmanaged. This contrasts with Hive Metastore, where the SQL Warehouses use the relevant cloud authorization mechanism – instance profile, service principal, or service account – to access the relevant data files...