At OpenAI, Kafka fuels real-time data streaming at massive scale, but traditional consumers struggle under the burden of partition management, offset tracking, error handling, retries, Dead Letter Queues (DLQ), and dynamic scaling — all while racing to maintain ultra-high throughput. As deployments scale, complexity multiplies. Enter Kafka Forwarder — a game-changing Kafka Consumer Proxy that flips the script on traditional Kafka consumption. By offloading client-side complexity and pushing messages to consumers, it ensures at-least-once delivery, automated retries, and seamless DLQ management via Databricks. The result? Scalable, reliable and effortless Kafka consumption that lets teams focus on what truly matters. Curious how OpenAI simplified self-service, high-scale Kafka consumption? Join us as we walk through the motivation, architecture and challenges behind Kafka Forwarder, and share how we structured the pipeline to seamlessly route DLQ data into Databricks for analysis.

This session is repeated.Is stream processing the future? We think so — and we’re building it with you using the latest capabilities in Apache Spark™ Structured Streaming. If you're a power user, this session is for you: we’ll demo new advanced features, from state transformations to real-time mode. If you prefer simplicity, this session is also for you: we’ll show how Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines simplifies managing streaming pipelines. And if you’re somewhere in between, we’ve got you covered — we’ll explain when to use your own streaming jobs versus Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines.

In the dynamic world of sports betting, precision and adaptability are key. Sports traders must navigate risk management, limitations of data feeds, and much more to prevent small model miscalculations from causing significant losses. To ensure accurate real-time pricing of hundreds of interdependent markets, traders provide key inputs such as player skill-level adjustments, whilst maintaining precise correlations. Black-box models aren’t enough— constant feedback loops drive informed, accurate decisions. Join DraftKings as we showcase how we expose real-time metrics from our simulation engine, to empower traders with deeper insights into how their inputs shape the model. Using Spark Structured Streaming, Kafka, and Databricks dashboards, we transform raw simulation outputs into actionable data. This transparency into our engines enables fine-grained control over pricing― leading to more accurate odds, a more efficient sportsbook, and an elevated customer experience.

Using SQL for data transformation is a powerful way for an analytics team to create their own data pipelines. However, relying on SQL often comes with tradeoffs such as limited functionality, hard-to-maintain stored procedures or skipping best practices like version control and data tests. Databricks supports building high-performing SQL ETL workloads. Attend this session to hear how Databricks supports SQL for data transformation jobs as a core part of your Data Intelligence Platform. In this session we will cover 4 options to use Databricks with SQL syntax to create Delta tables: Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines: A declarative ETL option to simplify batch and streaming pipelines dbt: An open-source framework to apply engineering best practices to SQL based data transformations SQLMesh: an open-core product to easily build high-quality and high-performance data pipelines SQL notebooks jobs: a combination of Databricks Workflows and parameterized SQL notebooks

Don’t you just hate telling your customers “No”? “No, I can’t get you the data that quickly”, or “No that logic isn’t possible to implement” really aren’t fun to say. But what if you had a tool that would allow you to implement those use cases? What if it was in a technology you were already familiar with — say, Spark Structured Streaming? There is a brand new arbitrary stateful operations API called TransformWithState, and after attending this deep dive you won’t have to say “No” anymore. During this presentation we’ll go through some real-world use cases and build them step-by-step. Everything from state variables, process vs. event time, watermarks, timers, state TTL, and even how you can initialize state with the checkpoint of another stream. Unlock your use cases with the power of Structured Streaming’s TransformWithState!

Swiggy, India's leading quick commerce platform, serves ~13 million users across 653 cities, with 196,000 restaurant partners and 17,000 SKUs. To handle this scale, Swiggy developed a secure, scalable AI platform processing millions of predictions per second. The tech stack includes Apache Kafka for real-time streaming, Apache Spark on Databricks for analytics and ML, and Apache Flink for stream processing. The Lakehouse architecture on Delta ensures data reliability, while Unity Catalog enables centralized access control and auditing. These technologies power critical AI applications like demand forecasting, route optimization, personalized recommendations, predictive delivery SLAs, and generative AI use cases.Key Takeaway:This session explores building a data platform at scale, focusing on cost efficiency, simplicity, and speed, empowering Swiggy to seamlessly support millions of users and AI use cases.

As part of the new Lakeflow data engineering experience, Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines makes it easy to build and manage reliable data pipelines. It unifies batch and streaming, reduces operational complexity and ensures dependable data delivery at scale — from batch ETL to real-time processing.Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines excels at declarative change data capture, batch and streaming workloads, and efficient SQL-based pipelines. In this session, you’ll learn how we’ve reimagined data pipelining with Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines, including: A brand new pipeline editor that simplifies transformations Serverless compute modes to optimize for performance or cost Full Unity Catalog integration for governance and lineage Reading/writing data with Kafka and custom sources Monitoring and observability for operational excellence “Real-time Mode” for ultra-low-latency streaming Join us to see how Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines powers better analytics and AI with reliable, unified pipelines.

Join us for an introductory session on Databricks DQX, a Python-based framework designed to validate the quality of PySpark DataFrames. Discover how DQX can empower you to proactively tackle data quality challenges, enhance pipeline reliability and make more informed business decisions with confidence. Traditional data quality tools often fall short by providing limited, actionable insights, relying heavily on post-factum monitoring, and being restricted to batch processing. DQX overcomes these limitations by enabling real-time quality checks at the point of data entry, supporting both batch and streaming data validation and delivering granular insights at the row and column level. If you’re seeking a simple yet powerful data quality framework that integrates seamlessly with Databricks, this session is for you.

As data engineering continues to evolve the shift from batch-oriented to streaming-first has become standard across the enterprise. The reality is these changes have been taking shape for the past decade — we just now also happen to be standing on the precipice of true disruption through automation, the likes of which we could only dream about before. Yes, AI Agents and LLMs are already a large part of our daily lives, but we (as data engineers) are ultimately on the frontlines ensuring that the future of AI is powered by consistent, just-in-time data — and Delta Lake is critical to help us get there. This session will provide you with best practices learned the hard way by one of the authors of The Delta Lake Definitive Guide including: Guide to writing generic applications as components Workflow automation tips and tricks Tips and tricks for Delta clustering (liquid, z-order, and classic) Future facing: Leveraging metadata for agentic pipelines and workflow automation

As data architectures evolve to meet the demands of real-time GenAI applications, organizations increasingly need systems that unify streaming and batch processing while maintaining compatibility with existing tools. The Ursa Engine offers a Kafka-API-compatible data streaming engine built on Lakehouse (Iceberg and Delta Lake). Designed to seamlessly integrate with data lakehouse architectures, Ursa extends your lakehouse capabilities by enabling streaming ingestion, transformation and processing — using a Kafka-compatible interface. In this session, we will explore how Ursa Engine augments your existing lakehouses with Kafka-compatible capabilities. Attendees will gain insights into Ursa Engine architecture and real-world use cases of Ursa Engine. Whether you're modernizing legacy systems or building cutting-edge AI-driven applications, discover how Ursa can help you unlock the full potential of your data.

In this course, you’ll learn how to apply patterns to securely store and delete personal information for data governance and compliance on the Data Intelligence Platform. We’ll cover topics like storing sensitive data appropriately to simplify granting access and processing deletes, processing deletes to ensure compliance with the right to be forgotten, performing data masking, and configuring fine-grained access control to configure appropriate privileges to sensitive data.Pre-requisites: Ability to perform basic code development tasks using the Databricks workspace (create clusters, run code in notebooks, use basic notebook operations, import repos from git, etc), intermediate programming experience with SQL and PySpark (extract data from a variety of file formats and data sources, apply a number of common transformations to clean data, reshape and manipulate complex data using advanced built-in functions), intermediate programming experience with Delta Lake (create tables, perform complete and incremental updates, compact files, restore previous versions etc.). Beginner experience with Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines and streaming workloads.Labs: YesCertification Path: Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional

In this course, you’ll learn how to optimize workloads and physical layout with Spark and Delta Lake and and analyze the Spark UI to assess performance and debug applications. We’ll cover topics like streaming, liquid clustering, data skipping, caching, photons, and more. Pre-requisites: Ability to perform basic code development tasks using the Databricks workspace (create clusters, run code in notebooks, use basic notebook operations, import repos from git, etc), intermediate programming experience with SQL and PySpark (extract data from a variety of file formats and data sources, apply a number of common transformations to clean data, reshape and manipulate complex data using advanced built-in functions), intermediate programming experience with Delta Lake (create tables, perform complete and incremental updates, compact files, restore previous versions etc.). Labs: Yes Certification Path: Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional

In this course, you’ll learn how to Incrementally process data to power analytic insights with Structured Streaming and Auto Loader, and how to apply design patterns for designing workloads to perform ETL on the Data Intelligence Platform with Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines. First, we’ll cover topics including ingesting raw streaming data, enforcing data quality, implementing CDC, and exploring and tuning state information. Then, we’ll cover options to perform a streaming read on a source, requirements for end-to-end fault tolerance, options to perform a streaming write to a sink, and creating an aggregation and watermark on a streaming dataset. Pre-requisites: Ability to perform basic code development tasks using the Databricks workspace (create clusters, run code in notebooks, use basic notebook operations, import repos from git, etc.), intermediate programming experience with SQL and PySpark (extract data from a variety of file formats and data sources, apply a number of common transformations to clean data, reshape and manipulate complex data using advanced built-in functions), intermediate programming experience with Delta Lake (create tables, perform complete and incremental updates, compact files, restore previous versions etc.). Beginner experience with streaming workloads and familiarity with Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines. Labs: No Certification Path: Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional

In this course, you’ll learn how to have efficient data ingestion with Lakeflow Connect and manage that data. Topics include ingestion with built-in connectors for SaaS applications, databases and file sources, as well as ingestion from cloud object storage, and batch and streaming ingestion. We'll cover the new connector components, setting up the pipeline, validating the source and mapping to the destination for each type of connector. We'll also cover how to ingest data with Batch to Streaming ingestion into Delta tables, using the UI with Auto Loader, automating ETL with Lakeflow Declarative Pipelines or using the API.This will prepare you to deliver the high-quality, timely data required for AI-driven applications by enabling scalable, reliable, and real-time data ingestion pipelines. Whether you're supporting ML model training or powering real-time AI insights, these ingestion workflows form a critical foundation for successful AI implementation.Pre-requisites: Beginner familiarity with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform (selecting clusters, navigating the Workspace, executing notebooks), cloud computing concepts (virtual machines, object storage, etc.), production experience working with data warehouses and data lakes, intermediate experience with basic SQL concepts (select, filter, groupby, join, etc), beginner programming experience with Python (syntax, conditions, loops, functions), beginner programming experience with the Spark DataFrame API (Configure DataFrameReader and DataFrameWriter to read and write data, Express query transformations using DataFrame methods and Column expressions, etc.Labs: NoCertification Path: Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate