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 SQL Warehouses

In this chapter, we will focus on the compute layer of the Lakehouse architecture. The compute layer in Databricks SQL is called the SQL Warehouse. We will learn how to create SQL Warehouses and configure them for the best possible user experience. We will also learn how the computation layer is instantiated on demand when a user executes a query.

The primary audience of this chapter is the Database administrators and Databricks workspace administrator personas. That said, Data analyst personas will also benefit from this chapter by learning how their queries are executed, how to avoid common pitfalls, and how to get the best possible performance.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understand the SQL Warehouse architecture
  • Creating and configuring SQL Warehouses
  • The art of SQL Warehouse sizing
  • Organizing and governing SQL Warehouses
  • Using Serverless SQL