About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Databricks Extends Capabilities of Lakehouse Data and AI Platform

Subscribe to our newsletter

Databricks, provider of the Lakehouse data and AI platform, has extended the platform’s capabilities with the addition of advanced data warehousing and governance, data sharing innovations including an analytics marketplace and data clean rooms for data collaboration, automatic cost optimisation for ETL operations, and machine learning (ML) lifecycle improvements.

The company, founded by the creators of open source solutions Delta Lake, Apache Spark and MLflow, works across business sectors including financial services, where its customer base includes the likes of Nasdaq, ABN Amro, Schroders, FIS, and Swedbank.

“Our customers want to be able to do business intelligence, AI and machine learning on one platform, where their data already resides. Databricks Lakehouse Platform gives data teams all of this on a simple, open, and multi-cloud platform,” says Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks.

The company’s additional data warehousing capabilities include Databricks SQL Serverless, available in preview on AWS and providing fully managed elastic compute for improved performance at a lower cost; Photon, a query engine for lakehouse systems that will be made generally available on Databricks Workspaces in coming weeks; open source connectors for Go, Node.js, and Python, to make it simpler to access the lakehouse from operational applications; and Databricks SQL CLI, enabling developers and analysts to run queries directly from their local computers.

Data governance additions include Unity Catalog, which will be made generally available on AWS and Azure, and provides centralised governance for all data and AI assets, with built-in search and discovery, and automated lineage for all workloads.

The company’s marketplace for data and AI will be available later this year, providing a place to package and distribute data and analytics assets. Unlike pure data marketplaces, Databricks’ offering enables data providers to package and monetise assets such as data tables, files, machine learning models, notebooks and analytics dashboards. Cleanrooms, also available later this year, will provide a way to share and join data across organisations with a secure, hosted environment and no data replication required.

ML advancements include MLflow 2.0, which includes MLflow Pipelines that can handle the operational set up of ML for users. Instead of setting up orchestration of notebooks, users can define the elements of the pipeline in a configuration file and MLflow Pipelines manages execution automatically. Beyond MLflow, Databricks has added serverless model endpoints to directly support production model hosting, as well as model monitoring dashboards to analyse real-world model performance.

Delta Live Tables is an ETL framework using a simple, declarative approach to building data pipelines. Since its introduction earlier this year, Databricks has expanded the framework with a new performance optimisation layer designed to speed up execution and reduce the costs of ETL.

Ghodsi concludes: “These new capabilities are advancing our Lakehouse vision to make it faster and easier than ever before to maximise the value of data, both within and across companies.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: How to leverage data lineage for actionable business insights

Date: 3 October 2023 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Data lineage is a must-have for financial institutions, but is it being used to its greatest extent, and is it delivering actionable business insights that inform product development and support competitive advantage? This webinar will address these questions, looking...

BLOG

Omba Advisory & Investments Selects FINBOURNE

Omba Advisory & Investments, a London-based investment management firm, has selected FINBOURNE Technology’s SaaS-native modern financial data stack as its operational data hub. The firm selected FINBOURNE after a market review, and will use the vendor’s LUSID PMS and Luminesce for portfolio management and improved data consolidation to help scale investment operations. Omba serves family...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 13th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

ESG Handbook 2023

The ESG Handbook 2023 edition is the essential guide to everything you need to know about ESG and how to manage requirements if you work in financial data and technology. Download your free copy to understand: What ESG Covers: The scope and definition of ESG Regulations: The evolution of global regulations, especially in the UK...