Databricks by Carahsoft Technology Corp [Private Offer Only]

My main use case for Databricks  involves the pipelines and ETL processes that we are implementing. Following the Medallion architecture with Gold, Silver, and Bronze layers, we filter the data, perform transformations, and integrate AI. Databricks  has made this process significantly easier.

I worked for an airline company where they experienced substantial delays in data processing. When a passenger booked a ticket, it took 20 to 25 minutes for the transaction to reflect in the system. Using Databricks, we compressed that time from 10 to 6 minutes initially and eventually reduced it to just a few seconds. After setting up all the pipelines and leveraging Databricks features to enhance and accelerate the process, this project became truly impactful and time-based, resulting in reduced processing time and ultimately increased profit for the airline company.

The best features Databricks offers are Unity Catalog, Databricks Workflow, Databricks AI, Agentic AI, and the automated pipelines that utilize AI. The AI models are very easy to create and deploy in just a few seconds. These are helpful and user-friendly tools.

I find myself using Unity Catalog most frequently because it provides a unified governance solution for all data and AI needs on Databricks, offering centralized access control, auditing, lineage, and data discovery capabilities across the platform. The main features include access control, security compliance standard models, built-in auditing, and lineage tracking. Most of my projects have involved integrating Unity Catalog into systems and providing overall security, including a migration project to transition to Unity Catalog.

The platform's unified data intelligence capabilities allow teams to analyze, manage, and activate data at scale, leading to faster time to insights, cleaner data pipelines, and significant savings on infrastructure and engineering efforts. Databricks eliminates data silos, accelerates the time to insight, empowers all data personnel, and provides built-in governance and security. It also supports AI and ML, which is an added advantage in today's AI-driven field.

Databricks already provides monthly updates and continuously works on delivering new features while enhancing existing ones. However, the platform could become easier to use. While instruction-led workshops are available, offering more free instructional workshops would allow a wider audience to access and learn about Databricks. Additionally, providing use cases would help beginners gain more knowledge and hands-on experience.

Regarding my experience, I was initially unfamiliar with the platform and had to conduct research and learn through various videos. I did find some instruction-led classes, but several of those required payment. The platform should provide more free resources to enable a broader audience to access and learn about Databricks. The platform itself is user-friendly and easy to use without complex issues, so I believe it does not need improvement in its core functionality. Rather, supporting aspects can be enhanced.

I have been working as a data engineer for four years. Initially, I was a software engineer, but my career has progressed as a data engineer over this four-year period.

Definitely. As I mentioned regarding my airline project, it was impactful because the cost was reduced by 60 to 70 percent. The company was initially using Azure  Blob storage, and in Databricks, the cluster and associated infrastructure were cheaper than other platforms. This reduction in both time and money resulted in real-time impact and significant cost savings.

For advice for others considering Databricks, it is important to start by understanding its place in the data ecosystem and how it fits into your specific needs. Key points to consider include familiarizing yourself with Databricks, learning the basics, starting with data engineering, and incorporating ETL processes. You can then dive deeper into Databricks features such as notebooks, clusters, and jobs. Achieving certification enhances your skills validation. For best practices, it is critical to optimize performance and minimize complexity while continuously learning to stay competitive in the data field. Following these steps will be very beneficial for anyone pursuing a career as a data engineer and Databricks engineer.

Databricks is a truly essential platform for data engineering needs, and I recommend it to anyone looking to advance in the data engineering field. It is a very important platform and tool for every data engineer. I encourage everyone to learn and explore this product and to maximize its potential. I rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My usual use case for Databricks  as an end-user mostly involves exporting data. This typically entails writing directly into a web interface to get the data out, so probably with Python.

The most significant benefit Databricks  has brought to my company is the Unity Catalog. Previously, with our data warehouse, we weren't able to track where sensitive data was. The Unity Catalog has been a big improvement, even though we haven't gotten the rest right.

The user interface is very useful, especially in writing directly into a web interface.

From my perspective, the ability to export data effectively and use Python within Databricks are key valuable features.

I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs.

We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake .

I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.

I have been working with Databricks for the last six months.

As a platform, Databricks is fine. However, our implementation isn't particularly reliable.

We've suffered from the lack of professionals with previous experience, which makes it difficult to dig ourselves out of the situation we've found ourselves in.

The scalability level of Databricks at the moment exceeds our needs. It's not a problem for us.

The sky's the limit with Databricks.

I have addressed technical support about our issue with Databricks. It was the team that engaged with them, and I believe our development teams also reach out for support, though I'm not sure what level of support they get.

Previously, when using Snowflake , we had customer reps who were really knowledgeable and helped us to avoid beginner mistakes. With Databricks, it seems we could have benefited from similar support. Our implementation team had no experience and made obvious mistakes. It may be that we opted not to have that support, but I believe we should have.

Before Databricks, I used SQL Server .

The big decision to switch from SQL Server  to Databricks was motivated by the lack of auditing, lineage, and tracking sensitive data in SQL Server, along with a need for more flexibility.

I did not participate in the initial setup of Databricks.

We use a consultancy, Avanade, for our Databricks implementation. They had previously done a Databricks implementation for another part of our organization. Our implementation team lacked experience which resulted in several beginner mistakes.

So far, we're not measuring any return on investment, such as saving time, money, or resources with Databricks. We're still in the phase where our old system and the new system are running simultaneously, so everything is twice as expensive and much effort is doubled. We haven't progressed far enough yet to realize any ROI.

I believe that in terms of credits for Databricks, we're spending between £15,000 and £20,000 a month.

I think Databricks is priced correctly. If we managed our resources better, we wouldn't be paying anywhere near that amount. The issue is with our management of resources.

No other options were considered because we used the consultancy Avanade, who had done a previous Databricks implementation for another part of our organization. We used them to recreate our implementation.

I'm probably not the best person to discuss certain aspects of Databricks since I haven't explored it deeply and am not part of the team developing it.

We haven't utilized Databricks' machine learning capabilities.

From my company, data ingestion and transformation are done with Databricks, though I don't do it directly.

I don't use Databricks' features for managing data, such as data lake and warehouse operations.

Most of our current work with Databricks isn't really live yet, so measuring savings in time and money or identifying any return on investment isn't applicable right now.

I would rate this review a 7 overall.

A typical use case for the solution is to build the data lakehouse for the client because they have a variety of source systems, and they want to unify that data into the lakehouse platform, where they want to use the data for analytical purposes and insights.

The most valuable features of Databricks  are especially the Delta Lake and the Unity Catalog; those are the main features. The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse. Currently, they're coming up with workflow jobs, along with other supporting elements to create an end-to-end solution.

In my opinion, areas of Databricks  that have room for improvement involve the dashboards. Until recently, everyone used third-party systems such as Power BI to connect to Databricks for dashboards and reports, but they're now coming up with their IBI dashboard, and I think they're on the right track to improve that even further.

I have approximately four years of experience working with Databricks.

I would rate the stability of Databricks as highly stable, around nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of this solution as very high, about nine out of ten.

I rate the technical support as fine because they have levels of technical support available, especially partners who get really good support from Databricks on new features. For us, it's so far so good with no problems, and I would rate the support quality as eight out of ten.

The initial setup of the Databricks solution is reasonably fair enough. It doesn't give any trouble to implement the solution, and I think it's fairly easy to set up and work on Databricks.

I can't say if there's seen an ROI from the solution because I do not have exposure in that area, although I think the people who decided to implement Databricks might have done all this analysis and POCs.

My relationship with the vendor is that I'm not a partner of Databricks; I work for a client where we use the Databricks software for implementing the solutions.

My clients are usually enterprise-level organizations, but the area where they're implementing is medium level here, although it might go into enterprise level in the future.

Regarding the price of Databricks, I don't involve myself in those decisions.

I think Databricks is very good at facilitating AI and machine learning projects; they implement AI and machine learning models very well, and clients can run their models on Databricks. I believe they are in a better place compared to competitors such as Snowflake , and they are tying up with important companies such as SAP and Palantir.

Based on my experience, I would recommend Databricks to other people. Overall, I would rate this solution as one of the best, about eight out of ten, although I might not know some of the pitfalls; it's based on use case to use case, but for us, it's working well.