What is databricks?
Databricks is a unified Lakehouse for data engineering, analytics and AI, built on Apache Spark and Delta Lake, with notebooks and SQL, MLflow and Unity Catalog, on AWS, Azure and GCP.
Databricks
What it is
Databricks is a lakehouse platform that fuses data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on top of Apache Spark. It offers a shared workspace—notebooks, SQL, jobs—so data teams build in one place instead of juggling tools.
How it works
You park data in cloud storage, layer Delta Lake for transactions and schema control, then spin up clusters or SQL warehouses as needed. Unity Catalog handles governance, and MLflow tracks models. Pipelines run as scheduled jobs; dashboards sit on top if you insist.
Where it shines
It scales without drama, handles batch and streaming in the same playbook, and makes versioned data a first-class citizen. Cross‑team workflows are smoother, and reproducibility isn’t an afterthought. If you live in Python, SQL, and parquet, it feels coherent.
Where it stumbles
Complexity creeps in fast: costs spike with sloppy clusters, and “just one more workspace” becomes sprawl. Notebooks encourage quick wins but punish long‑term software hygiene. Traditional warehouses still beat it for dead‑simple BI, and lock‑in to its patterns is real.
What features and use cases does databricks offer?
- Unified Lakehouse platform combining data warehousing and data lakes (Delta Lake) for all data types
- Managed Apache Spark compute for scalable ETL/ELT, batch processing, and streaming analytics
- Collaborative notebooks (SQL, Python, R, Scala) with real-time co-editing and version control
- Built-in ML lifecycle management (MLflow) for experiment tracking, model training, deployment, and MLOps
- High-performance SQL analytics with dashboards, query optimization, and data exploration tools
- Centralized data governance and security (Unity Catalog) for permissions, lineage, and auditing
- Orchestrated jobs and workflows with integrations to major cloud storage and data sources
Prices
| Pricing category | Price | Short description |
|---|---|---|
| Community Edition | free | Limited single-user workspace for learning; small clusters; no SLA. |
| Free Trial | free | Time-limited trial with free credits; availability and credit amount vary by cloud/region. |
Prices may vary by region. We do not guarantee the accuracy of prices. For current information see: https://www.databricks.com
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