Databricks workflows has come a long way since the initial days of orchestrating simple notebooks and jar/wheel files. Now we can orchestrate multi-task jobs and create a chain of tasks with lineage and DAG with either fan-in or fan-out among multiple other patterns or even run another Databricks job directly inside another job.

Databricks workflows takes its tag: “orchestrate anything anywhere” pretty seriously and is a truly fully-managed, cloud-native orchestrator to orchestrate diverse workloads like Delta Live Tables, SQL, Notebooks, Jars, Python Wheels, dbt, SQL, Apache Spark™, ML pipelines with excellent monitoring, alerting and observability capabilities as well. Basically, it is a one-stop product for all orchestration needs for an efficient lakehouse. And what is even better is, it gives full flexibility of running your jobs in a cloud-agnostic and cloud-independent way and is available across AWS, Azure and GCP.

In this session, we will discuss and deep dive on some of the very interesting features and will showcase end-to-end demos of the features which will allow you to take full advantage of Databricks workflows for orchestrating the lakehouse.

Talk by: Prashanth Babu

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Legacy data warehouses are costly to maintain, unscalable and cannot deliver on data science, ML and real-time analytics use cases. Migrating from your enterprise data warehouse to Databricks lets you scale as your business needs grow and accelerate innovation by running all your data, analytics and AI workloads on a single unified data platform.

In the first part of this session we will guide you through the well-designed process and tools that will help you from the assessment phase to the actual implementation of an EDW migration project. Also, we will address ways to convert PL/SQL proprietary code to an open standard python code and take advantage of PySpark for ETL workloads and Databricks SQL’s data analytics workload power.

The second part of this session will be based on an EDW migration project of SNCF (French national railways); one of the major enterprise customers of Databricks in France. Databricks partnered with SNCF to migrate its real estate entity from Oracle DW and IBM DataStage to Databricks on AWS. We will walk you through the customer context, urgency to migration, challenges, target architecture, nitty-gritty details of implementation, best practices, recommendations, and learnings in order to execute a successful migration project in a very accelerated time frame.

Talk by: Himanshu Arora and Amine Benhamza

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Unity Catalog provides fully automated data lineage for all workloads in SQL, R, Python, Scala and across all asset types at Databricks. The aggregated view has been available to end users through data explorer and API. In this session, we are excited to share that lineage is available via delta table in their UC metastore. It stores full history of recent lineage records and it is near real time. Additionally, customers can query it through standard SQL interface. With that, customers can get significant operational insights about their workload for impact analysis, troubleshooting, quality assurance, data discovery, and data governance.

Together with the system table platform effort, which provides query history, job run operational data, audit logs and more, lineage table will be a critical piece to link all the data asset and entity asset together, providing better lakehouse observability and unification to customers.

Talk by: Menglei Sun

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BI applications are undoubtedly one of the major consumers of a data warehouse. Nevertheless, the prospect of accessing data using standard SQL is appealing to many more stakeholders than just the data analysts. We’ve heard from customers that they experience an increasing demand to provide access to data in their lakehouse platforms from external applications beyond BI, such as e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, SaaS applications, or custom data applications developed in-house. These applications require an “always on” experience, which makes Databricks SQL Serverless a great fit.

In this session, we give an overview of the approaches available to application developers to connect to Databricks SQL and create modern data applications tailored to needs of users across an entire organization. We discuss when to choose one of the Databricks native client libraries for languages such as Python, Go, or node.js and when to use the SQL Statement Execution API, the newest addition to the toolset. We also explain when ODBC and JDBC might not be the best for the task and when they are your best friends. Live demos are included.

Talk by: Adriana Ispas and Chris Stevens

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PySpark has accomplished many milestones such as Project Zen, and been increasingly growing. We introduced pandas API on Spark, and hugely improved usability such as error messages, type hints, etc., and PySpark has become almost the very standard of distributed computing in Python. With this trend, the kind of PySpark use cases became also very complicated especially for modern data applications such as notebooks, IDEs, even devices such as smart home devices leveraging the power of data, that virtually need a lightweight separate client. However, today’s PySpark client is considerably heavy, and does not allow the separation from its scheduler, optimizer and analyzer as an example.

In Apache Spark 3.4, one of the key features we introduced in PySpark is the Python client for Spark Connect that decouples client-server architecture for Apache Spark that allows remote connectivity to Spark clusters using the DataFrame API and unresolved logical plans as the protocol. The separation between client and server allows Apache Spark and its open ecosystem to be leveraged from everywhere. It can be embedded in modern data applications. In this talk, we will introduce what Spark Connect is, the internals of Spark Connect with Python, how to use Spark Connect with Python in the end-user perspective, and what’s next beyond Apache Spark 3.4.

Talk by: Hyukjin Kwon and Ruifeng Zheng

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The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is responsible for maintaining and improving nearly 12,000 miles of shallow-draft (9'-14') inland and intracoastal waterways, 13,000 miles of deep-draft (14' and greater) coastal channels, and 400 ports, harbors, and turning basins throughout the United States. Because these components of the national waterway network are considered assets to both US commerce and national security, they must be carefully managed to keep marine traffic operating safely and efficiently.

The National DQM Program is tasked with providing USACE a nationally standardized remote monitoring and documentation system across multiple vessel types with timely data access, reporting, dredge certifications, data quality control, and data management. Government systems have often lagged commercial systems in modernization efforts, and the emergence of the cloud and Data Lakehouse Architectures have empowered USACE to successfully move into the modern data era.

This session incorporates aspects of these topics: Data Lakehouse Architecture: Delta Lake, platform security and privacy, serverless, administration, data warehouse, Data Lake, Apache Iceberg, Data Mesh GIS: H3, MOSAIC, spatial analysis data engineering: data pipelines, orchestration, CDC, medallion architecture, Databricks Workflows, data munging, ETL/ELT, lakehouses, data lakes, Parquet, Data Mesh, Apache Spark™ internals. Data Streaming: Apache Spark Structured Streaming, real-time ingestion, real-time ETL, real-time ML, real-time analytics, and real-time applications, Delta Live Tables. ML: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn, Python and R ecosystems data governance: security, compliance, RMF, NIST data sharing: sharing and collaboration, delta sharing, data cleanliness, APIs.

Talk by: Jeff Mroz

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Data and machine learning (ML) are crucial for enterprise operations. Enterprises store data in databases for management and use ML to gain business insights. However, there is a mismatch between the way ML expects data to be organized (a single table) and the way data is organized in databases (a join graph of multiple tables) and leads to inefficiencies when joining and materializing tables.

In this talk, you will see how we successfully address this issue. We introduce JoinBoost, a lightweight python library that trains tree models (such as random forests and gradient boosting) for join graphs in databases. JoinBoost acts as a query rewriting layer that is compatible with cloud databases, and eliminates the need for costly join materialization.

Talk by: Zachary Huang

Here’s more to explore: State of Data + AI Report: https://dbricks.co/44i2HBp Databricks named a Leader in 2022 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM CDBMS: https://dbricks.co/3phw20d

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With the rapid proliferation of consumer data privacy laws across the world, it is becoming a strict requirement for data organizations to be mindful of data privacy risks. Privacy violation fines are reaching record highs and will only get higher as governments continue to crack down on the runaway abuse of user data. To continue producing value without becoming a liability, data systems must include privacy protections at a foundational level.

The most practical way to do this is to enable privacy as code, shifting privacy left and including it as a foundational part of the organization's software development life cycle. The promise of privacy as code is that data organizations can be liberated from inefficient, manual workflows for producing the compliance deliverables their legal teams need, and instead ship at speed with pre-defined privacy guardrails built into the structure of their preferred workflows.

Despite being an emerging and complex problem, there are already powerful open source tools available designed to help organizations of all sizes achieve this outcome. Fides is an open source privacy as code tool, written in Python and Typescript, that is engineered to tackle a variety of privacy problems throughout the application lifecycle. The most relevant feature for data organizations is the ability to annotate systems and their datasets with data privacy metadata, thus enabling automatic rejection of dangerous or illegal uses. Fides empowers data organizations to be proactive, not reactive, in terms of protecting user privacy and reducing organizational risk. Moving forward data privacy will need to be top of mind for data teams.

Talk by: Thomas La Piana

Here’s more to explore: Data, Analytics, and AI Governance: https://dbricks.co/44gu3YU

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While SQL is powerful, it does have some limits. Fear not, this lightning talk introduces user-defined functions (UDFs) written in Python, managed and governed in Databricks Unity Catalog, and usable across the Lakehouse. This covers the basics from how to create and govern UDFs to more advanced topics including networking, observability and provide a glimpse of how it works under the hood. After this session, you will be equipped to take SQL and the Lakehouse to the next level using Python UDFs.

Talk by: Jakob Mund

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Let’s face it -- data is messy. And your company’s business requirements? Even messier. You’re staring at your screen, knowing there is a tool that will let you give your business partners the information they need as quickly as they need it. There’s even a Python version of it now. But…it looks kind of scary. You’ve never used it before, and you don’t know where to start. Yes, we’re talking about the dreaded flatMapGroupsWithState. But fear not - we’ve got you covered.

In this session, we’ll take a real-word use case and use it to show you how to break down flatMapGroupsWithState into its basic building blocks. We’ll explain each piece in both Scala and the newly-released Python, and at the end we’ll illustrate how it all comes together to enable the implementation of arbitrary stateful operations with Spark Structured Streaming.

Talk by: Angela Chu

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In today's data-driven landscape, the demands placed upon data engineers are diverse and multifaceted. With the integration of Java, Python, or Go microservices, Databricks SDKs provide a powerful bridge between the established ecosystems and Databricks. They allow data engineers to unlock new levels of integration and collaboration, as well as integrate Unity Catalog into processes to create advanced workflows straight from notebooks.

In this session, learn best practices for when and how to use SDK, command-line interface, or Terraform integration to seamlessly integrate with Databricks and revolutionize how you integrate with the Databricks Lakehouse. The session covers using shell scripts to automate complex tasks and streamline operations that improve scalability.

Talk by: Serge Smertin

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This session teaches how & why to use the open-source Spark NLP library. Spark NLP provides state-of-the-art accuracy, speed, and scalability for language understanding by delivering production-grade implementations of recent research advances. Spark NLP is the most widely used NLP library in the enterprise today; provides thousands of current, supported, pre-trained models for 200+ languages out of the box; and is the only open-source NLP library that can natively scale to use any Apache Spark cluster.

We’ll walk through Python code running common NLP tasks like document classification, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, spell checking, question answering, and translation. The discussion of each task includes the latest advances in deep learning and transfer learning used to tackle it. We’ll also cover new free tools for data annotation, no-code active learning & transfer learning, easily deploying NLP models as production-grade services, and sharing models you’ve trained.

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Databricks SQL (DB SQL) allows customers to leverage the simple and powerful Lakehouse architecture with up to 12x better price/performance compared to traditional cloud data warehouses. Analysts can use standard SQL to easily query data and share insights using a query editor, dashboards or a BI tool of their choice, and analytics engineers can build and maintain efficient data pipelines, including with tools like dbt.

While SQL is great at querying and transforming data, sometimes you need to extend its capabilities with the power of Python, a full programming language. Users of Databricks notebooks already enjoy seamlessly mixing SQL, Python and several other programming languages. Use cases include masking or encrypting and decrypting sensitive data, complex transformation logic, using popular open source libraries or simply reusing code that has already been written elsewhere in Databricks. In many cases, it is simply prohibitive or even impossible to rewrite the logic in SQL.

Up to now, there was no way to use Python from within DBSQL. We are removing this restriction with the introduction of Python User Defined Functions (UDFs). DBSQL users can now create, manage and use Python UDFs using standard SQL. UDFs are registered in Unity Catalog, which means they can be governed and used throughout Databricks, including in notebooks.

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This talk is a story, using examples in Python and pySpark, about testing ETL pipelines efficiently. I won’t try to convince you that you need unit tests or automated tests – that’s up to you. If you do have unit tests for your ETL pipelines, or if you want them, it can be useful to make sure you aren’t testing more than you need.

I’ll be describing how a practical (non-pyramid shaped) heuristic helps me efficiently cover edge cases and unexpected bugs in my code by ensuring I test only the code needed for the feature I’m building.

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Microservices is an increasingly popular architecture much loved by application teams, for it allows services to be developed and scaled independently. Data teams, though, often need a centralized repository where all data from different services come together to join and aggregate. The data platform can serve as a single source of company facts, enable near real time analytics, and secure sharing of massive data sets across clouds.

A viable microservices ingestion pattern is Change Data Capture, using AWS Database Migration Services or Debezium. CDC proves to be a scalable solution ideal for stable platforms, but it has several challenges for evolving services: Frequent schema changes, complex, unsupported DDL during migration, and automated deployments are but a few. An event streaming architecture can address these challenges.

Confluent, for example, provides a schema registry service where all services can register their event schemas. Schema registration helps with verifying that the events are being published based on the agreed contracts between data producers and consumers. It also provides a separation between internal service logic and the data consumed downstream. The services write their events to Kafka using the registered schemas with a specific topic based on the type of the event.

Data teams can leverage Spark jobs to ingest Kafka topics into Bronze tables in the Delta Lake. On ingestion, the registered schema from schema registry is used to validate the schema based on the provided version. A merge operation is sometimes called to translate events into final states of the records per business requirements.

Data teams can take advantage of Delta Live Tables on streaming datasets to produce Silver and Gold tables in near real time. Each input data source also has a set of expectations to ensure data quality and business rules. The pipeline allows Engineering and Analytics to collaborate by mixing Python and SQL. The refined data sets are then fed into Auto ML for discovery and baseline modeling.

To expose Gold tables to more consumers, especially non spark users across clouds, data teams can implement Delta Sharing. Recipients can accesses Silver tables from a different cloud and build their own analytics data sets. Analytics teams can also access Gold tables via pandas Delta Sharing client and BI tools.

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Time series forecasting has a wide range of applications: finance, retail, healthcare, IoT, etc. Recently deep learning models such as ESRNN or N-BEATS have proven to have state-of-the-art performance in these tasks. Nixtlats is a python library that we have developed to facilitate the use of these state-of-the-art models to data scientists and developers, so that they can use them in productive environments. Written in pytorch, its design is focused on usability and reproducibility of experiments. For this purpose, nixtlats has several modules:

Data: contains datasets of various time series competencies. Models: includes state-of-the-art models. Evaluation: has various loss functions and evaluation metrics.

Objective:

• To introduce attendees to the challenges of time series forecasting with deep learning.
• Commercial applications of time series forecasting.
• Describe nixtlats, their components and best practices for training and deploying state-of-the-art models in production.
• Reproduction of state-of-the-art results using nixtlats from the winning model of the M4 time series competition (ESRNN).

Project repository: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtlats.

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PySpark has rapidly evolved with the momentum of Project Zen introduced in Apache Spark 3.0. We improved error messages, added type hints for autocompletion, implemented visualization, etc. Most importantly, Pandas API on Spark was introduced from Apache Spark 3.2 which exposes the pandas API that runs on Apache Spark, and the Pandas API on Spark has gained a lot of popularity.

In Apache Spark 3.3, the effort of Project Zen continued and PySpark has many cool changes such as more API coverage & faster default index in Pandas API on Spark, datetime.timedelta support, new PyArrow batch interface, better autocompletion, Python & Pandas UDF profiler and new error classification.

In this talk, we will introduce what is new in PySpark at Apache Spark 3.3, and what is next beyond Apache Spark 3.3 with the current effort and roadmap in PySpark.

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Modern machine learning (ML) workloads, such as deep learning and large-scale model training, are compute-intensive and require distributed execution. Ray is an open-source, distributed framework from U.C. Berkeley’s RISELab that easily scales Python applications and ML workloads from a laptop to a cluster, with an emphasis on the unique performance challenges of ML/AI systems. It is now used in many production deployments.

This talk will cover Ray’s overview, architecture, core concepts, and primitives, such as remote Tasks and Actors; briefly discuss Ray’s native libraries (Ray Tune, Ray Train, Ray Serve, Ray Datasets, RLlib); and Ray’s growing ecosystem to scale your Python or ML workloads.

Through a demo using XGBoost for classification, we will demonstrate how you can scale training, hyperparameter tuning, and inference—from a single node to a cluster, with tangible performance difference when using Ray.

The takeaways from this talk are :

Learn Ray architecture, core concepts, and Ray primitives and patterns Why Distributed computing will be the norm not an exception How to scale your ML workloads with Ray libraries: Training on a single node vs. Ray cluster, using XGBoost with/without Ray Hyperparameter search and tuning, using XGBoost with Ray and Ray Tune Inferencing at scale, using XGBoost with/without Ray

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This talk will look at the current state of tools to automate library and language upgrades in Python and Scala and apply them to upgrading to new version of Apache Spark. After doing a very informal survey, it seems that many users are stuck on no longer supported versions of Spark, so this talk will expand on the first attempt at automating upgrades (2.4 - 3.0) to explore the problem all the way back to 2.1.

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SQL users working with Pandas and Spark quickly realize SQL is a second-class interface, invoked between predominantly Python code.

We will introduce FugueSQL, an enhanced SQL interface that allows SQL lovers to express end-to-end workflows predominantly in SQL. With a Jupyter notebook extension, SQL commands can be used in Databricks notebooks for interactive handling of in-memory datasets. This allows heavy SQL users to fully leverage Spark in their preferred grammar.

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