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

Connecting programmatically

While we are discussing JDBC and ODBC Driver Connectors, we must make an honorable mention of a very important use case. This use case is how application programs access the data on the data lakehouse via Databricks SQL. For example, consider the dashboard that we compiled in Figure 5.41 in Chapter 5, The Workbench. The taxi company may build a desktop or a web application that renders this dashboard. To do so, the application must issue SQL queries to the tables via a connection to Databricks SQL. These applications can be programmed in any of the modern languages, such as Java, Python, and Scala, to name a few, using their constructs for working with JDBC and ODBC drivers.

Note

A note of caution: Databricks SQL and the data lakehouse are not a replacement for your relational database management systems or online transactional processing systems.

Application programmers are not the intended audience for this book; however, Databricks SQL can hold...