Every day thousands of customers choose to run business-critical Spark workloads on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, a platform built by the creators of Apache Spark™. These customers take advantage of platform capabilities such as fully managed compute resources, dynamic autoscaling, an integrated workflow orchestration tool and of Photon, the extremely fast vectorized execution engine. All of these make the Databricks Lakehouse Platform the best place to run Spark workloads providing operational benefits as well as tremendous price/performance value.

This session which includes live demos will cover these and other platform capabilities that can help you build your next optimized Spark application.

Talk by: Justin Breese

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

We designed a scalable Spark Streaming job to manage 100s of millions of prescription-related operations per day at an end-to-end SLA of a few minutes and a lookup time of one second using CosmosDB.

In this session, we will share not only the architecture, but the challenges and solutions to using the Spark Cosmos connector at scale. We will discuss usages of the Aggregator API, custom implementations of the CosmosDB connector, and the major roadblocks we encountered with the solutions we engineered. In addition, we collaborated closely with Cosmos development team at Microsoft and will share the new features which resulted. If you ever plan to use Spark with Cosmos, you won't want to miss these gotchas!

Talk by: Daniel Zafar

Here’s more to explore: Big Book of Data Engineering: 2nd Edition: https://dbricks.co/3XpPgNV The Data Team's Guide to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform: https://dbricks.co/46nuDpI

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Apache Spark is a popular distributed framework for big data processing. It is commonly used for ETL (extract, transform and load) across large datasets. Today, the transform stage can often include the application of deep learning models on the data. For example, common models can be used for classification of images, sentiment analysis of text, language translation, anomaly detection, and many other use cases. Applying these models within Spark can be done today with the combination of PySpark, Pandas_UDF, and a lot of glue code. Often, that glue code can be difficult to get right, because it requires expertise across multiple domains - deep learning frameworks, PySpark APIs, pandas_UDF internal behavior, and performance optimization.

In this session, we introduce a new, simplified API for deep learning inferencing on Spark, introduced in SPARK-40264 as a collaboration between NVIDIA and Databricks, which seeks to standardize and open source this glue code to make deep learning inference integrations easier for everyone. We discuss its design and demonstrate its usage across multiple deep learning frameworks and models.

Talk by: Lee Yang

Here’s more to explore: LLM Compact Guide: https://dbricks.co/43WuQyb Big Book of MLOps: https://dbricks.co/3r0Pqiz

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

When doing the TPC-DS benchmark using external v2 data source, we have observed that for several of the queries, DS v1 has better join plans than Apache Spark. The main reason is that DS v1 uses column stats, especially number of distinct values (NDV) for query optimization. Currently, Spark™ DS v2 only has interfaces for data sources to report table statistics such as size in bytes and number of rows. In order to use column stats in DS v2, we have added new interfaces to allow external data sources to report column stats to Spark.

For a data source with huge data, it’s always challenging to get the column stats, especially the NDV. We plan to calculate NDV using Apache DataSketches Theta sketch and save the serialized compact sketch in the statistics file. The NDV and other column stats will be reported to Spark for query plan optimization.

Talk by: Huaxin Gao and Parth Chandra

Here’s more to explore: Why the Data Lakehouse Is Your next Data Warehouse: https://dbricks.co/3Pt5unq Lakehouse Fundamentals Training: https://dbricks.co/44ancQs

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Every year, billions of dollars are lost due to water risks from storms, floods, and droughts. Water data scarcity and excess are issues that risk models cannot overcome, creating a world of uncertainty. Divirod is building a platform of water data by normalizing diverse data sources of varying velocity into one unified data asset. In addition to publicly available third-party datasets, we are rapidly deploying our own IoT sensors. These sensors ingest signals at a rate of about 100,000 messages per hour into preprocessing, signal-processing, analytics, and postprocessing workloads in one spark-streaming pipeline to enable critical real-time decision-making processes. By leveraging streaming architecture, we were able to reduce end-to-end latency from tens of minutes to just a few seconds.

We are leveraging Delta Lake to provide a single query interface across multiple tables of this continuously changing data. This enables data science and analytics workloads to always use the most current and comprehensive information available. In addition to the obvious schema transformations, we implement data quality metrics and datum conversions to provide a trustworthy unified dataset.

Talk by: Adam Wilson and Heiko Udluft

Here’s more to explore: Big Book of Data Engineering: 2nd Edition: https://dbricks.co/3XpPgNV The Data Team's Guide to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform: https://dbricks.co/46nuDpI

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Delta Lake is an open source project that helps implement modern data lake architectures commonly built on cloud storages. With Delta Lake, you can achieve ACID transactions, time travel queries, CDC, and other common use cases on the cloud.

There are a lot of use cases of Delta tables on AWS. AWS has invested a lot in this technology, and now Delta Lake is available with multiple AWS services, such as AWS Glue Spark jobs, Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum. AWS Glue is a serverless, scalable data integration service that makes it easier to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. With AWS Glue, you can easily ingest data from multiple data sources such as on-prem databases, Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, MongoDB into Delta Lake on Amazon S3 even without expertise in coding.

This session will demonstrate how to get started with processing Delta Lake tables on Amazon S3 using AWS Glue, and querying from Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift. The session also covers recent AWS service updates related to Delta Lake.

Talk by: Noritaka Sekiyama and Akira Ajisaka

Here’s more to explore: Why the Data Lakehouse Is Your next Data Warehouse: https://dbricks.co/3Pt5unq Lakehouse Fundamentals Training: https://dbricks.co/44ancQs

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

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

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Simon and Denny have been discussing and debating all things Delta, Lakehouse and Apache Spark™ on their regular webshow. Whether you want advice on lake structures, want to hear their opinions on the latest trends and hype in the data world, or you simply have a tech implementation question to throw at two seasoned experts, these two will have something to say on the matter. In their previous shows, Simon and Denny focused on building out a sample lakehouse architecture, refactoring and tinkering as new features came out, but now we're throwing the doors open for any and every question you might have.

So if you've had a persistent question and think these two can help, this is the session for you. There will be a question submission form shared prior to the event, so the team will be prepped with a whole bunch of topics to talk through. Simon and Denny want to hear your questions, which they can field drawing from a wealth of industry experience, wide ranging community engagement and their differing perspectives as external consultant and internal Databricks respectively. There's also a chance they'll get distracted and go way off track talking about coffee, sci-fi, nerdery or the English weather. It happens.

Talk by: Simon Whiteley and Denny Lee

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

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

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Attend this session and learn about an innovative solution built around Databricks structured streaming and Delta Live Tables (DLT) to replicate thousands of tables from on-premises to cloud-based relational databases. A highly desirable pattern for many enterprises across the industries to replicate on-premises data to cloud-based data lakes and data stores in near real time for consumption.

This powerful architecture can offload legacy platform workloads and accelerate cloud journey. The intelligent cost-efficient solution leverages thread-pools, multi-task jobs, Kafka, Apache Spark™ structured streaming and DLT. This session will go into detail about problems, solutions, lessons-learned and best practices.

Talk by: Suneel Konidala and Murali Madireddi

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

In today's competitive business environment, customer engagement is a top priority for organizations looking to retain and grow their customer base. In this session, we will showcase how we used Databricks, a powerful machine learning platform, to build and deploy distributed deep learning machine learning models using Apache Spark™ and Horovod for best-in-class customer engagement. We will discuss the challenges we faced and the solutions we implemented, including data preparation, model training, and model deployment. We will also share the results of our efforts, including increased customer retention and improved customer satisfaction. Attendees will walk away with practical tips and best practices for using Databricks to drive customer engagement in for their own organizations. In this session we will:

• ]Explore Morgan Stanley’s approach to best-in-class customer engagement
• Discuss how data and technology was leveraged to help solve the business problem
• Share our experience using Databricks to build and deploy machine learning models for customer engagement
• Provide practical tips and best practices for using Databricks in a production environment

Talk by: Raja Lanka and Ryan Kennedy

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

The production and management of large-scale vector embeddings can be a challenging problem. The integration of Databricks, Hugging Face and Pinecone offers a powerful solution. Vector embeddings have become an essential tool in the development of AI powered applications. Embeddings are representations of data learned by machine models. High quality embeddings are unlocking use cases like semantic search, recommendation engines, and anomaly detection. Databricks' Apache Spark™ ecosystem together with Hugging Face's Transformers library enable large-scale vector embeddings production using GPU processing, Pinecone's vector database provides ultra-low latency querying and upserting of billions of embeddings, allowing for high-quality embeddings at scale for real-time AI apps.

In this session, we will present a concrete use case of this integration in the context of a natural language processing application. We will demonstrate how Pinecone's vector database can be integrated with Databricks and Hugging Face to produce large-scale vector embeddings of text data and how these embeddings can be used to improve the performance of various AI applications. You will see the benefits of this integration in terms of speed, scalability, and cost efficiency. By leveraging the GPU processing capabilities of Databricks and the ultra low-latency querying capabilities of Pinecone, we can significantly improve the performance of NLP tasks while reducing the cost and complexity of managing large-scale vector embeddings. You will learn about the technical details of this integration and how it can be implemented in your own AI projects, and gain insights into the speed, scalability, and cost efficiency benefits of using this solution.

Talk by: Roie Schwaber-Cohen

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Over the past decade, developers, researchers, and the community at large have successfully built tens of thousands of data applications using Apache Spark™. Since then, use cases and requirements of data applications have evolved. Today, every application, from web services that run in application servers, interactive environments such as notebooks and IDEs, to phones and edge devices such as smart home devices, want to leverage the power of data. However, Spark's driver architecture is monolithic, running client applications on top of a scheduler, optimizer and analyzer. This architecture makes it hard to address these new requirements as there is no built-in capability to remotely connect to a Spark cluster from languages other than SQL.

Spark Connect introduces a decoupled 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 Spark and its open ecosystem to be leveraged from everywhere. It can be embedded in modern data applications, in IDEs, notebooks and programming languages. This session highlights how simple it is to connect to Spark using Spark Connect from any data applications or IDEs. We will do a deep dive into the architecture of Spark Connect and provide an outlook on how the community can participate in the extension of Spark Connect for new programming languages and frameworks bringing the power of Spark everywhere.

Talk by: Martin Grund and Stefania Leone

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Have some great questions about Apache Spark™ and Lakehouses?  Well, come by and ask the experts your questions!

Talk by: Martin Grund, Hyukjin Kwon, and Wenchen Fan

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Unplanned downtime in manufacturing costs firms up to a trillion dollars annually. Time that materials spend sitting on a production line is lost revenue. Even just 15 hours of downtime a week adds up to over 800 hours of downtime yearly. The use of Internet of Things or IoT devices can cut this time down by providing details of machine metrics. However, IoT predictive maintenance is challenged by the lack of effective, scalable infrastructure and machine learning solutions. IoT data can be the size of multiple terabytes per day and can come in a variety of formats. Furthermore, without any insights and analysis, this data becomes just another table.

The KPMG Databricks IoT Accelerator is a comprehensive solution enabling manufacturing plant operators to have a bird’s eye view of their machines’ health and empowers proactive machine maintenance across their portfolio of IoT devices. The Databricks Accelerator ingests IoT streaming data at scale and implements the Databricks Medallion architecture while leveraging Delta Live Tables to clean and process data. Real time machine learning models are developed from IoT machine measurements and are managed in MLflow. The AI predictions and IoT device readings are compiled in the gold table powering downstream dashboards like Tableau. Dashboards inform machine operators of not only machines’ ailments, but action they can take to mitigate issues before they arise. Operators can see fault history to aid in understanding failure trends, and can filter dashboards by fault type, machine, or specific sensor reading. 

Talk by: MacGregor Winegard

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksin

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

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

This session will cover the challenges and the solution that The Trade Desk went through to scale their ML models for NLP for 100 million web pages per day.

TTD's contextual targeting team needs to analyze 100 million web pages per day. Fifty percent of the webpages are non-English. Half of the content was not being properly analyzed and targeted intelligently. TTD attempted to build a model using Spark NLP, however the package could not scale and was not cost-effective. GPU utilization was low and the solution was cost prohibitive. TTD engaged with Databricks in early 2022 to build an NLP model on Databricks. Our teams partnered closely together. We were able to build a solution using distributed inference (150-200 GPUs running at 80%+ utilization); Each day, Databricks translated two hundred times faster across 50 million web pages that are in for over 35 + languages and at a fraction of the cost. This solution enables TTD teams to standardize on English for contextual targeting ML models. TTD can now be a one-stop shop for their customers' global advertising needs.

The Trade Desk is headquartered in Ventura, California. It is the largest independent demand-side platform in the world, competing against Google, Facebook, and others. Unlike traditional marketing, programmatic marketing is operated by real-time, split-second decisions based on user identity, device information, and other data points. It enables highly personalized consumer experiences and improves return-on-investment for companies and advertisers.

Talk by: Xuefu Wang and Mark Lee

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Join us for this Technical Deep Dive session. In 2022, Apache Spark™ was awarded the prestigious SIGMOD Systems Award, because Spark is the de facto standard for data processing.

In this session, we will share the latest progress in Apache Spark community. With tremendous contribution from the open source community, Spark 3.4 managed to resolve in excess of 2,400 Jira tickets. We will talk about the major features and improvements in Spark 3.4. The major updates are Spark Connect, numerous PySpark and SQL language features, engine performance enhancements, as well as operational improvements in Spark UX and error handling.

Talk by: Xiao Li and Daniel Tenedorio

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Spark developers want to develop and debug their code using their tools of choice and development best practices while ensuring high-production fidelity on the target remote cluster. However, Spark's driver architecture is monolithic, with no built-in capability to directly connect to a remote Spark cluster from languages other than SQL. This makes it hard to enable such interactive developer experiences from a user’s local IDE of choice. Spark Connect’s decoupled client-server architecture introduces remote connectivity to Spark clusters and with that, enables interactive development experience - Spark and its open ecosystem can be leveraged from everywhere.

In this session, we show how we leverage Spark Connect to build a completely redesigned version of Databricks Connect, a first-class IDE-based developer experience that offers interactive debugging from any IDE. We show how developers can easily ensure consistency between their local and remote environments. We walk the audience through real-live examples of how to locally debug code running on Databrick. We also show how Databricks Connect integrates into the Databricks Visual Studio Code extension for an even better developer experience.

Talk by: Martin Grund and Stefania Leone

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

Did you finish the Photon whitepaper and think, wait, what? I know I did; it’s my job to understand it, explain it, and then use it. If your role involves using Apache Spark™ on Databricks, then you need to know about Photon and where to use it. Join me, chief dummy, nay "supreme" dummy, as I break down this whitepaper into easy to understand explanations that don’t require a computer science degree. Together we will unravel mysteries such as:

• Why is a Java Virtual Machine the current bottleneck for Spark enhancements?
• What does vectorized even mean? And how was it done before?
• Why is the relationship status between Spark and Photon "complicated?"

In this session, we’ll start with the basics of Apache Spark, the details we pretend to know, and where those performance cracks are starting to show through. Only then will we start to look at Photon, how it’s different, where the clever design choices are and how you can make the most of this in your own workloads. I’ve spent over 50 hours going over the paper in excruciating detail; every reference, and in some instances, the references of the references so that you don’t have to.

Talk by: Holly Smith

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc