Day 13-Azure Databricks for Data Engineering
1. What is Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is a high-performance cloud-based analytics platform
developed in collaboration between Microsoft and Databricks. It's tailored for
data engineering, big data processing, and machine learning, all integrated
with Azure’s cloud services.
2. Key Features
- Built on Apache Spark: Enables parallel data processing at scale.
- Collaborative Workspace: Shared notebooks for teams to work in real-time.
- Smart Resource Management: Auto-scaling and auto-shutdown features
reduce cost.
- ML Integration: Supports libraries like MLflow, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and
scikit-learn.
- Cloud Storage Support: Works with Azure Data Lake, Blob Storage, and
more.
- Security & Governance: Provides enterprise-level data security and access
controls.
- Supports SQL & BI Tools: Query data with SQL and connect to BI tools such
as Power BI.
3. Databricks at a Glance
Databricks provides a single platform to manage:
- Data Engineering (ETL, pipelines)
- Machine Learning workflows
- Business Intelligence & dashboards
It runs on major cloud platforms: Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
4. Essential Components
- Workspaces: Central environment to create notebooks, dashboards, and
manage code repositories.
- Clusters: Engines that run Spark jobs; they scale automatically.
- Notebooks: Interactive coding environments for Python, SQL, R, Scala.
- Jobs: Scheduled workflows for pipelines and scripts.
- Delta Lake: Enhances data lakes with ACID transactions and versioning.
- MLflow: Manages model experiments, tracking, and deployment.
5. Benefits of Azure Databricks
- Unified experience across data engineering and AI
- Easily scales up or down
- Built-in collaboration tools
- Deep integration with Azure and other cloud services
- Compatible with open-source technologies like Spark and MLflow
6. Practical Applications
- ETL Pipelines: Extract from multiple sources, transform and load into
warehouses.
- Data Science: Build and train ML models, monitor them with MLflow.
- Real-Time Analytics: Handle streaming data from sources like Kafka or IoT
devices.
- Business Intelligence: Perform complex SQL queries, visualize data via BI
tools.
- Data Lakehouse: Merge the flexibility of data lakes with the structure of data
warehouses using Delta Lake.
7. Getting Started: Azure Free Trial
- Visit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free
- Sign up or use an existing Microsoft account.
- Verify identity using phone and card.
- Fill in your personal and address details.
- Accept terms and create the account.
8. Creating a Workspace
1. Sign in at https://portal.azure.com
2. Click "Create a Resource" and search for Azure Databricks.
3. Click "Create" and enter:
- Subscription
- Resource Group
- Workspace Name
- Region
- Pricing Tier (Free/Premium)
4. Click "Review + Create" → "Create"
5. Once deployed, select "Go to Resource" and click "Launch Workspace"
This will open the Databricks UI where you can start coding, analyzing, and
building models.
