Databricks Fundamentals

Data Lakehouse Paradigm

• Emphasizes unified security, governance, and cataloging for data.
• Offers a unified data storage approach for reliability and sharing.
• Uses Delta Lake for data storage, a file-based open-source format providing ACID transactions, scalable data and metadata handling, audit history, schema enforcement, and support for various operations.
• Leverages Unity Catalog for data discovery, classification, user management, access control, data lineage, automated monitoring, auditing, and data sharing.

Databricks Data Intelligence Platform

• Combines the Data Lakehouse paradigm with advanced AI capabilities.
• Offers Databricks AI, Delta Live Tables (ETL), Workflows (Orchestration), and Databricks SQL (Data Warehousing) components.
• These components are supported by the Data Intelligence Engine, Unity Catalog, and Delta Lake.

Databricks Data Governance

• Implements robust data governance through:
  • Unity Catalog for centralized governance and security.
  • Delta Sharing for secure data sharing between organizations.
  • Databricks Marketplace for commercialization of datasets.
  • Databricks Clean Rooms for private, secure computing environments fostering collaboration.

Control Plane and Data Plane

• Control Plane encompasses:
  • The web application interface.
  • Configurations, notebooks, repositories, and Databricks SQL.
  • Cluster management.
• It manages security for the Data Plane.
• Data Plane consists of clusters and cloud storage.
• Includes data encryption measures for data at rest and in motion.

Compliance

• Databricks adheres to various compliance standards including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, FedRAMP High, HITRUST, HIPAA, and PCI.
• It is ready for GDPR and CCPA compliance.

Serverless Data Plane

• Offers serverless computation capabilities for cost reduction, improved productivity, and increased efficiency.
• Provides elastic scalability, automatically scaling up and down based on demand.
• Introduces three-layer isolation with data encryption for enhanced security.

Photon

• A query engine designed to accelerate data and analytics workflows.
• Utilizes Delta/Parquet data formats and delivers data in the same formats.
• Compatible with Spark APIs for seamless integration.
• Aims to accelerate data and analytics workflows, particularly useful for SQL-based jobs, IoT use cases, data privacy and compliance, and loading data into Delta and Parquet formats.

Databricks SQL

• Simplifies data analysis through its text-to-SQL feature, auto-generating code/queries, and assisting with problem diagnosis and solutions.
• Integrates with Unity Catalog for enhanced data management.
• Provides optimal TCO, performance, and intelligent workloads for Data Warehousing.
• Offers elastic allocation of resources for flexible scaling.

Orchestration

• Workflows facilitate intelligent ETL processes, AI-driven debugging, end-to-end monitoring, and seamless integration with a broad ecosystem.

Delta Live Tables

• Enables automated and scalable streaming ingestion and transformation processes.
• Provides automated autoscaling for efficient resource management.
• Features intelligent orchestration, error handling, and optimization.
• Offers automated checkpoints for restarting interrupted processes and incremental data refresh functionality.

Data Science and AI

• Allows secure model training, rapid model deployment to production, and cost-effective deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Supports custom models, model serving, RAGs (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), MLOps (ML Flow), AutoML, monitoring, and governance.

DatabricksX

• Empowers users to build their own LLMs, train models, and perform RAGs cost-effectively.