Snowflake is reshaping data management by integrating AI, analytics, and enterprise workloads into a single cloud platform. Snowflake: The Definitive Guide is a comprehensive resource for data architects, engineers, and business professionals looking to harness Snowflake's evolving capabilities, including Cortex AI, Snowpark, and Polaris Catalog for Apache Iceberg. This updated edition provides real-world strategies and hands-on activities for optimizing performance, securing data, and building AI-driven applications. With hands-on SQL examples and best practices, this book helps readers process structured and unstructured data, implement scalable architectures, and integrate Snowflake's AI tools seamlessly. Whether you're setting up accounts, managing access controls, or leveraging generative AI, this guide equips you with the expertise to maximize Snowflake's potential. Implement AI-powered workloads with Snowflake Cortex Explore Snowsight and Streamlit for no-code development Ensure security with access control and data governance Optimize storage, queries, and computing costs Design scalable data architectures for analytics and machine learning

Generative AI is rapidly spreading across industries, and companies are actively hiring people who can design, build, and deploy these systems. But to land one of these roles, you'll have to get through the interview first. Generative AI Interviews walks you through every stage of the interview process, giving you an insider's perspective that will help you build confidence and stand out. This handy guide features 300 real-world interview questions organized by difficulty level, each with a clear outline of what makes a good answer, common pitfalls to avoid, and key points you shouldn't miss. What sets this book apart from others is Mina Ghashami and Ali Torkamani's knack for simplifying complex concepts into intuitive explanations, accompanied by compelling illustrations that make learning engaging. If you're looking for a guide to cracking GenAI interviews, this is it. Master GenAI interviews for roles from fundamental to advanced Explore 300 real industry interview questions with model answers and breakdowns Learn a step-by-step approach to explaining architecture, training, inference, and evaluation Get actionable insights that will help you stand out in even the most competitive hiring process

SQL is no longer just a querying language for relational databases—it's a foundational tool for building scalable, modern data solutions across real-time analytics, machine learning workflows, and even generative AI applications. Advanced SQL shows data professionals how to move beyond conventional SELECT statements and tap into the full power of SQL as a programming interface for today's most advanced data platforms. Written by seasoned data experts Rui Pedro Machado, Hélder Russa, and Pedro Esmeriz, this practical guide explores the role of SQL in streaming architectures (like Apache Kafka and Flink), data lake ecosystems, cloud data warehouses, and ML pipelines. Geared toward data engineers, analysts, scientists, and analytics engineers, the book combines hands-on guidance with architectural best practices to help you extend your SQL skills into emerging workloads and real-world production systems. Use SQL to design and deploy modern, end-to-end data architectures Integrate SQL with data lakes, stream processing, and cloud platforms Apply SQL in feature engineering and ML model deployment Master pipe syntax and other advanced features for scalable, efficient queries Leverage SQL to build GenAI-ready data applications and pipelines

Since its release in late 2024, Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) has redefined how developers build and connect AI agents to tools, data, and each other. AI Agents with MCP is the first comprehensive guide to this rapidly emerging standard, helping engineers unlock its full potential with hands-on projects. Whether you're developing agentic workflows, bridging tools across platforms, or creating robust multiagent systems, this book walks you through every layer of MCP--from protocol structure to server and client implementation. Author Kyle Stratis provides the practical expertise needed to build fully functional MCP servers, clients, and more. Unlike high-level overviews or fragmented documentation, this book gives you a deep systems-level understanding of MCP's capabilities--and limitations. With its flexible, model-agnostic design, MCP continues to gain traction across the generative AI community; this book ensures you're ready to build with it confidently and effectively. Understand the structure and core concepts of the Model Context Protocol Build complete MCP servers, clients, and transport layers in Python Consume tools, prompts, and data via MCP-based agent workflows Extend agent capabilities with MCP for large-scale and AI-native systems

Companies are now moving generative AI projects from the lab to production environments. To support these increasingly sophisticated applications, they're turning to advanced practices such as multiagent architectures and complex code-based frameworks. This practical handbook shows you how to leverage cutting-edge techniques using Microsoft's powerful ecosystem of tools to deploy trustworthy AI systems tailored to your organization's needs. Written for and by AI professionals, Generative AI on Microsoft Azure goes beyond the technical core aspects, examining underlying principles, tools, and practices in depth, from the art of prompt engineering to strategies for fine-tuning models to advanced techniques like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic AI. Through real-world case studies and insights from top experts, you'll learn how to harness AI's full potential on Azure, paving the way for groundbreaking solutions and sustainable success in today's AI-driven landscape. Understand the technical foundations of generative AI and how the technology has evolved over the last few years Implement advanced GenAI applications using Microsoft services like Azure AI Foundry, Copilot, GitHub Models, Azure Databricks, and Snowflake on Azure Leverage patterns, tools, frameworks, and platforms to customize AI projects Manage, govern, and secure your AI-enabled systems with responsible AI practices Build upon expert guidance to avoid common pitfalls, future-proof your applications, and more

Master end-to-end data engineering on Azure Databricks. From data ingestion and Delta Lake to CI/CD and real-time streaming, build secure, scalable, and performant data solutions with Spark, Unity Catalog, and ML tools. Key Features Build scalable data pipelines using Apache Spark and Delta Lake Automate workflows and manage data governance with Unity Catalog Learn real-time processing and structured streaming with practical use cases Implement CI/CD, DevOps, and security for production-ready data solutions Explore Databricks-native ML, AutoML, and Generative AI integration Book Description "Data Engineering with Azure Databricks" is your essential guide to building scalable, secure, and high-performing data pipelines using the powerful Databricks platform on Azure. Designed for data engineers, architects, and developers, this book demystifies the complexities of Spark-based workloads, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, and real-time data processing. Beginning with the foundational role of Azure Databricks in modern data engineering, you’ll explore how to set up robust environments, manage data ingestion with Auto Loader, optimize Spark performance, and orchestrate complex workflows using tools like Azure Data Factory and Airflow. The book offers deep dives into structured streaming, Delta Live Tables, and Delta Lake’s ACID features for data reliability and schema evolution. You’ll also learn how to manage security, compliance, and access controls using Unity Catalog, and gain insights into managing CI/CD pipelines with Azure DevOps and Terraform. With a special focus on machine learning and generative AI, the final chapters guide you in automating model workflows, leveraging MLflow, and fine-tuning large language models on Databricks. Whether you're building a modern data lakehouse or operationalizing analytics at scale, this book provides the tools and insights you need. What you will learn Set up a full-featured Azure Databricks environment Implement batch and streaming ingestion using Auto Loader Optimize Spark jobs with partitioning and caching Build real-time pipelines with structured streaming and DLT Manage data governance using Unity Catalog Orchestrate production workflows with jobs and ADF Apply CI/CD best practices with Azure DevOps and Git Secure data with RBAC, encryption, and compliance standards Use MLflow and Feature Store for ML pipelines Build generative AI applications in Databricks Who this book is for This book is for data engineers, solution architects, cloud professionals, and software engineers seeking to build robust and scalable data pipelines using Azure Databricks. Whether you're migrating legacy systems, implementing a modern lakehouse architecture, or optimizing data workflows for performance, this guide will help you leverage the full power of Databricks on Azure. A basic understanding of Python, Spark, and cloud infrastructure is recommended.

Generative AI is revolutionizing industries, and Kubernetes has fast become the backbone for deploying and managing these resource-intensive workloads. This book serves as a practical, hands-on guide for MLOps engineers, software developers, Kubernetes administrators, and AI professionals ready to unlock AI innovation with the power of cloud native infrastructure. Authors Roland Huß and Daniele Zonca provide a clear road map for training, fine-tuning, deploying, and scaling GenAI models on Kubernetes, addressing challenges like resource optimization, automation, and security along the way. With actionable insights with real-world examples, readers will learn to tackle the opportunities and complexities of managing GenAI applications in production environments. Whether you're experimenting with large-scale language models or facing the nuances of AI deployment at scale, you'll uncover expertise you need to operationalize this exciting technology effectively. Learn to run GenAI models on Kubernetes for efficient scalability Get techniques to train and fine-tune LLMs within Kubernetes environments See how to deploy production-ready AI systems with automation and resource optimization Discover how to monitor and scale GenAI applications to handle real-world demand Uncover the best tools to operationalize your GenAI workloads Learn how to run agent-based and AI-driven applications

Analytics has always been "ground zero" for citizen developers and the low-code/no-code movement. However, the shift toward generative AI and the avalanche of analytics content will overwhelm current analytics operating models, which are already struggling to scale delivery.

As AI shapes business decisions, making unstructured data AI-ready is a key governance priority. The quality, accessibility and security of unstructured data directly determine the performance of AI applications, particularly for GenAI. To unlock its value for AI initiatives, data and business leaders should evolve their governance strategies to effectively manage, protect and utilize unstructured data, ensuring it is AI-ready while meeting compliance and security requirements.

Despite advancements in GenAI, self-service analytics continues to fail at delivering its expected impact to organizations due to governance, trust, accuracy, scalability and adoption challenges. This presentation provides CDAOs with strategies to derive more value from analytics investments.

Generative AI technologies and techniques are evolving at an unprecedented pace, accompanied by significant hype, making it challenging for leaders to navigate this dynamic landscape. AI leaders can leverage this Hype Cycle to identify the innovations most worth pursuing as they shape and execute their AI strategies.

Many organizations are wondering how GenAI will impact their D&A governance and management tools, and by extension, their D&A governance operations. This research provides an overview of how key D&A markets are incorporating GenAI capabilities and how these will change the nature of D&A governance.

AI agents are permeating applications and systems across organizations. Their flexibility is valuable in unpredictable environments where real-time monitoring and control aren’t practical. However, their adaptive strength comes with nondeterministic weaknesses. Increased autonomy and complexities in multiagent systems, compounded by GenAI models, dangerously raise uncertainty, prompting the question: are multiagent systems worth it?

The buzz: “Dashboards are dead.” Yet, they remain the backbone of enterprise analytics for operational oversight. GenAI is revolutionizing the space, promising to streamline migration and inject intelligence, but only 8% of new reports use it today. Explore the “death of dashboards” narrative, along with the opportunities and pitfalls of migrating to next-gen analytics.

Overlooked risks and unintended consequences of GenAI can disrupt operations, ethics, security and value realization. CDAOs should understand the second- and third-order effects of GenAI adoption and proactively address hidden challenges to safeguard their organizations’ competitiveness and resilience.

Almost every GenAI use case requires organizations to extract, qualify and govern significant volumes of unstructured data. Data management leaders must deliver workflows that orchestrate entity extraction, vector data embeddings and semantic data enrichment with structured data pipelines to deliver GenAI-ready data. Join this session to learn more.

GenAI solutions include several choices and trade-offs. A critical decision is: should you build custom AI solutions in-house or buy off-the-shelf products? This session brings together a debate on the trade-offs, risk and rewards of each approach. The session will be based on scenarios and use-cases to highlight key considerations such as cost, reliability , flexibility and speed for different decisions such as LLMs vs. SLMs, RAG vs. AI agents, packaged platform capability vs. bespoke custom solution, packaged vs. open-source.

This session will explore how generative AI technology will evolve over the next decade, moving from large, general-purpose models to agentic, multimodal and deeply personalized systems. IT leaders will gain foresight into the architectural, ethical, and strategic shifts that will define the next wave of enterprise AI.

AI spending continues unabated and so is the pressure on leaders. CIOs need to demonstrate the value of AI. CFOs need to calculate it. The c-suite needs to collaborate to create real value. Here we present Gartner's framework for a rigorous, repeatable approach to financial operations (FinOps) of AI initiatives. The focus is on the economics of business value, cost and risk of AI, GenAI and agentic AI.

In today's race to harness generative AI, many teams struggle to integrate these advanced tools into their business systems. While platforms like GPT-4 and Google's Gemini are powerful, they aren't always tailored to specific business needs. This book offers a practical guide to building scalable, customized AI solutions using the full potential of data lakehouse architecture. Author Bennie Haelen covers everything from deploying ML and GenAI models in Databricks to optimizing performance with best practices. In this must-read for data professionals, you'll gain the tools to unlock the power of large language models (LLMs) by seamlessly combining data engineering and data science to create impactful solutions. Learn to build, deploy, and monitor ML and GenAI models on a data lakehouse architecture using Databricks Leverage LLMs to extract deeper, actionable insights from your business data residing in lakehouses Discover how to integrate traditional ML and GenAI models for customized, scalable solutions Utilize open source models to control costs while maintaining model performance and efficiency Implement best practices for optimizing ML and GenAI models within the Databricks platform