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

Using Business Intelligence Tools with Databricks SQL

Databricks SQL is a well-rounded, self-contained data analytics platform. It provides users such as analysts and data administrators with all the tools that are required for them to conduct their daily workflows. As we saw in the preceding chapters, pretty much everything can be done on Databricks SQL – exploratory data analysis, reports, dashboards, alerts, and more.

Despite all that, though, it is by no means a replacement for dedicated Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or Qlik.

These BI tools can connect with Databricks SQL with simple, transparent mechanisms to query the data on the data lakehouse. In this chapter, we will focus on how to connect Databricks SQL to BI tools of your choice.

The primary audience of this chapter is analysts who want to use BI tools of their choice with Databricks SQL. The database administrator personas will also benefit from this chapter as it...