Databricks

Databricks is a cloud-based data analytics platform that provides a unified data analytics environment designed to simplify data engineering, data science, and machine learning workflows. The company was founded in 2013 by the creators of Apache Spark, including Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica, and it built its offerings around the Spark engine and the concept of a data lakehouse, combining data lake storage with data warehousing capabilities.

Databricks offers the Databricks Unified Data Analytics Platform, which runs on major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The platform supports collaborative notebooks, automated cluster management, and scalable compute for ETL, analytics, and model training. It emphasizes Delta Lake as a storage layer that adds ACID transactions and schema enforcement to data lakes, and it integrates MLflow for machine learning lifecycle management and Unity Catalog for centralized data governance.

Databricks markets a cloud-native service with features for data engineering, data science, machine learning, and SQL-based analytics. It provides options for data warehousing workloads via SQL analytics, streaming, and batch processing, as well as governance and secure data sharing.

As of 2024, Databricks remains privately held, funded by multiple rounds from a range of investors, and maintains partnerships with cloud providers to support its platform. The company has been a major proponent of the lakehouse paradigm, positioning itself as an integrated interface for data engineering, analytics, and AI initiatives.