The Data Intelligence Platform on Azure Databricks is reshaping the landscape of Data and AI. This comprehensive managed service leverages the innovative Lakehouse architecture powered by Delta Lake, seamlessly integrating with Microsoft Azure’s cloud capabilities. By eliminating infrastructure complexities, it accelerates data, analytics, and AI initiatives with unparalleled efficiency.
Databricks has been recognised as a Leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave for Data Lakehouses, achieving top marks in both strategy and current offerings. With standout performance in areas such as GenAI/LLM, integration, and security, Databricks continues to set the standard. The strong partnership between Databricks and Microsoft further enhances this synergy, allowing users to concentrate on their data and AI objectives, making Azure the premier public cloud for Databricks.
Azure Databricks combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses into one unified system for data storage, processing, security, and governance, and in today’s article we’re going to look at some recent updates that will further enhance the capabilities of Azure Databricks, including features in Unity Catalog, advanaced integration with DatabricksIQ, and improvements in data governance and AI optimisation.
Data and AI governance is the essential backbone of data and AI democratisation. Azure Databricks addresses this need with Unity Catalog, a unified governance solution seamlessly integrated into the platform. Unity Catalog offers comprehensive management of both data and assets like models, ensuring consistent governance across all workloads—from analytics and ETL to model serving. It centralises access control, auditing, lineage tracking, and AI-powered data documentation and discovery across Azure Databricks workspaces.
DatabricksIQ integrates with Unity Catalog to deliver AI-powered optimisation, monitoring, and observability. Unity Catalog on Azure Databricks ensures data integrity and consistency across workspaces, streamlining collaboration and ensuring regulatory compliance. Administrators can implement precise access policies, track real-time data provenance, and manage a comprehensive inventory of data and AI assets, including models, features, and notebooks. Additionally, Unity Catalog enables automated monitoring, error diagnosis, data quality management, and proactive alerts for issues such as PII breaches and model drift. With built-in system tables for billing, auditing, and compute, it provides full observability into operations.
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Azure Databricks SQL (DBSQL) delivers intelligent data warehousing capabilities and seamlessly integrates with Power BI in Microsoft Fabric, empowering users to perform complex analytics and derive meaningful insights. DBSQL supports SQL-based querying, enabling users to interact with data using familiar language constructs. The native Databricks connector ensures secure and efficient data delivery directly from the Lakehouse to Power BI. Additionally, DBSQL offers advanced features such as support for streaming tables, materialized views, window functions, user-defined functions, and AI functions, allowing data analysts and scientists to easily handle sophisticated analytical tasks.
Azure Databricks is just one click away in the Azure Portal, enabling users to effortlessly leverage warehousing, ETL, or machine learning while Azure manages all machine provisioning with its new Serverless capabilities. These capabilities utilise AI to prewarm capacity and autoscale according to your needs, ensuring you are only charged when your code runs.
Mosaic AI within Azure Databricks meets the growing demand for both Generative AI and traditional AI use cases, tightly connected to all enterprise data. Mosaic AI offers an end-to-end solution for building, deploying, and monitoring AI—from predictive modeling to the latest GenAI and large language models (LLMs) on top of Unity Catalog. Despite the challenges of operationalising LLM applications in IT environments, Mosaic AI LLMOps, a core component of Azure Databricks, enables organisations to securely and cost-effectively integrate their enterprise data into the AI and GenAI lifecycle.
At Spanish Point Technologies, we are dedicated to empowering business with cutting-edge solutions like Azure Databricks. By harnessing the power of Azure Databricks, we enable our clients to streamline their data analytics and AI initiatives. Contact us today to find out how we can help revolutionise your data and AI landscape with Azure Databricks and drive innovation within your organisation.
