Dynamic policy enforcement is increasingly critical in today's landscape, where data compliance is a top priorities for companies, individuals, and regulators alike. In this talk, Walaa explores how LinkedIn has implemented a robust dynamic policy enforcement engine, ViewShift, and integrated it within its data lake. He will demystify LinkedIn's query engine stack by demonstrating how catalogs can automatically route table resolutions to compliance-enforcing SQL views. These SQL views possess several noteworthy properties: Auto-Generated: Created automatically from declarative data annotations. User-Centric: They honor user-level consent and preferences. Context-Aware: They apply different transformations tailored to specific use cases. Portable: Despite the SQL logic being implemented in a single dialect, it remains accessible across all engines. Join this session to learn how ViewShift helps ensure that compliance is seamlessly integrated into data processing workflows.

In this session, we will explore the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood's approach to synchronizing an Azure SQL Datavault 2.0 (DV2.0) implementation with Unity Catalog (UC) using Lakeflow Connect. Lifeblood's DV2.0 data warehouse, which includes raw vault (RV) and business vault (BV) tables, as well as information marts defined as views, required a multi-step process to achieve data/business logic sync with UC. This involved using Lakeflow Connect to ingest RV and BV data, followed by a custom process utilizing JDBC to ingest view definitions, and the automated/manual conversion of T-SQL to Databricks SQL views, with Lakehouse Monitoring for validation. In this talk, we will share our journey, the design decisions we made, and how the resulting solution now supports analytics workloads, analysts, and data scientists at Lifeblood.

Analysts often begin their Databricks journey by running familiar SQL queries in the SQL Editor, but that’s just the start. In this session, I’ll share the roadmap I followed to expand beyond ad-hoc querying into SQL Editor/notebook-driven development to scheduled data pipelines producing interactive dashboards — all powered by Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog. You’ll learn how to organize tables with primary-key/foreign-key relationships along with creating table and column comments to form the semantic model, utilizing DBSQL features like RELY constraints. I’ll also show how parameterized dashboards can be set up to empower self-service analytics and feed into Genie Spaces. Attendees will walk away with best practices for starting out with building a robust BI platform on Databricks, including tips for table design and metadata enrichment. Whether you’re a data analyst or BI developer, this talk will help you unlock powerful, AI-enhanced analytics workflows.

This session is repeated. Databricks has a free, comprehensive solution for migrating legacy data warehouses from a wide range of source systems. See how we accelerate migrations from legacy data warehouses to Databricks SQL, achieving 50% faster migration than traditional methods. We'll cover the tool’s automated migration process: Discovery: Source system profiling Assessment: Legacy code analysis Conversion: Advanced code transpilation Reconciliation: Data validation This comprehensive approach increases the predictability of migration projects, allowing businesses to plan and execute migrations with greater confidence.

We’ll explore how CipherOwl Inc. constructed a near real-time, multi-chain data lakehouse to power anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring at a petabyte scale. We will walk through the end-to-end architecture, which integrates cutting-edge open-source technologies and AI-driven analytics to handle massive on-chain data volumes seamlessly. Off-chain intelligence complements this to meet rigorous AML requirements. At the core of our solution is ChainStorage, an OSS started by Coinbase that provides robust blockchain data ingestion and block-level serving. We enhanced it with Apache Spark™ and Arrow™, coupled for high-throughput processing and efficient data serialization, backed by Delta Lake and Kafka. For the serving layer, we employ StarRocks to deliver lightning-fast SQL analytics over vast datasets. Finally, our system incorporates machine learning and AI agents for continuous data curation and near real-time insights, which are crucial for tackling on-chain AML challenges.

This session is repeated. Improving healthcare impacts us all. We highlight how Premier Inc. took risk-adjusted patient data from more than 1,300 member hospitals across America, applying a natural language interface using AI/BI Genie, allowing our users to discover new insights. The stakes are high, new insights surfaced represent potential care improvement and lives positively impacted. Using Genie and our AI-ready data in Unity Catalog, our team was able to stand up a Genie instance in three short days, bypassing costs and time of custom modeling and application development. Additionally, Genie allowed our internal teams to generate complex SQL, as much as 10 times faster than writing it by hand. As Genie and lakehouse apps continue to advance rapidly, we are excited to leverage these features by introducing Genie to as many as 20,000 users across hundreds of hospitals. This will support our members’ ongoing mission to enhance the care they provide to the communities they serve.

Bayada is transforming its data ecosystem by consolidating Matillion+Snowflake and SSIS+SQL Server into a unified Enterprise Data Platform powered by Databricks. Using Databricks' Medallion architecture, this platform enables seamless data integration, advanced analytics and machine learning across critical domains like general ledger, recruitment and activity-based costing. Databricks was selected for its scalability, real-time analytics and ability to handle both structured and unstructured data, positioning Bayada for future growth. The migration aims to reduce data processing times by 35%, improve reporting accuracy and cut reconciliation efforts by 40%. Operational costs are projected to decrease by 20%, while real-time analytics is expected to boost efficiency by 15%. Join this session to learn how Bayada is leveraging Databricks to build a high-performance data platform that accelerates insights, drives efficiency and fosters innovation organization-wide.

At Haleon, we've leveraged Databricks APIs and serverless compute to develop customer-facing applications for our business. This innovative solution enables us to efficiently deliver SAP invoice and order management data through front-end applications developed and served via our API Gateway. The Databricks lakehouse architecture has been instrumental in eliminating the friction associated with directly accessing SAP data from operational systems, while enhancing our performance capabilities. Our system acheived response times of less than 3 seconds from API call, with ongoing efforts to optimise this performance. This architecture not only streamlines our data and application ecosystem but also paves the way for integrating GenAI capabilities with robust governance measures for our future infrastructure. The implementation of this solution has yielded significant benefits, including a 15% reduction in customer service costs and a 28% increase in productivity for our customer support team.

At Italgas, Europe’s leading gas distributor both by network size and number of customers, we are spearheading digital transformation through a state-of-the-art, fully-fledged Databricks Intelligent platform. Achieved 50% cost reduction and 20% performance boost migrating from Azure Synapse to Databricks SQL Deployed 41 ML/GenAI models in production, with 100% of workloads governed by Unity Catalog Empowered 80% of employees with self-service BI through Genie Dashboards Enabled natural language queries for control-room operators analyzing network status The future of gas distribution is data-driven: predictive maintenance, automated operations, and real-time decision making are now realities. Our AI Factory isn't just digitizing infrastructure—it's creating a more responsive, efficient, and sustainable gas network that anticipates needs before they arise.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has transformed AI applications by grounding responses with external data. It can be better. By pairing RAG with low latency SQL analytics, you can enrich responses with instant insights, leading to a more interactive and insightful user experience with fresh, data-driven intelligence. In this talk, we’ll demo how low latency SQL combined with an AI application can deliver speed, accuracy, and trust.

This session is repeated. For most companies, building compound AI systems remains aspirational. LLMs are powerful, but imperfect, and their non-deterministic nature makes steering them to high accuracy a challenge. In this session, we’ll demonstrate how to build compound AI systems using SLMs and highly accurate mini-agents that can be integrated into agentic workflows. You'll learn about breakthrough techniques, including: memory RAG, an embedding algorithm that reduces hallucinations using embed-time compute to generate contextual embeddings, improving indexing and retrieval, and memory tuning, a finetuning algorithm that reduces hallucinations using a Mixture of Memory Experts (MoME) to specialize models with proprietary data. We’ll also share real-world examples (text-to-SQL, factual reasoning, function calling, code analysis and more) across various industries. With these building blocks, we’ll demonstrate how to create high accuracy mini-agents that can be composed into larger AI systems.

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

Grace-Blackwell is NVIDIA’s most recent GPU system architecture. It addresses a key concern of query engines: fast data access. In this session, we will take a close look at how GPUs can accelerate data analytics by tracing how a row flows through a GPU-enabled query engine.Query engines read large data from CPU memory or from disk. On Blackwell GPUs, a query engine can rely on hardware-accelerated decompression of compact formats. The Grace-Blackwell system takes data access performance even further, by reading data at up to 450 GB/s across its CPU to GPU interconnect. We demonstrate full end-to-end SQL query acceleration using GPUs in a prototype query engine using industry standard benchmark queries. We compare the results to existing CPU solutions.Using Apache Spark™ and the RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark, we demonstrate the impact GPU acceleration has on the performance of SQL queries at the 100TB scale using NDS, a suite that simulates real-world business scenarios.

Timely and actionable insights are critical for staying competitive in today’s fast-paced environment. At HP Print, manual reporting for executive leadership (ELT) has been labor-intensive, hindering agility and productivity. To address this, we developed the Generative Insights Tool (GenIT) using Databricks Genie and Mosaic AI to create a real-time insights engine automating SQL generation, data visualization, and narrative creation. GenIT delivers instant insights, enabling faster decisions, greater productivity, and improved consistency while empowering leaders to respond to printer trends. With automated querying, AI-powered narratives, and a chatbot, GenIT reduces inefficiencies and ensures quality data and insights. Our roadmap integrates multi-modal data, enhances chatbot functionality, and scales globally. This initiative shows how HP Print leverages GenAI to improve decision-making, efficiency, and agility, and we will showcase this transformation at the Databricks AI Summit.

In today's data landscape, organizations often grapple with fragmented data spread across various databases, data warehouses and catalogs. Lakehouse Federation addresses this challenge by enabling seamless discovery, querying, and governance of distributed data without the need for duplication or migration. This session will explore how Lakehouse Federation integrates external data sources like Hive Metastore, Snowflake, SQL Server and more into a unified interface, providing consistent access controls, lineage tracking and auditing across your entire data estate. Learn how to streamline analytics and AI workloads, enhance compliance and reduce operational complexity by leveraging a single, cohesive platform for all your data needs.

The News Sentiment application enhances the discoverability of news content through our flagship platform, Capital IQ Pro. We processed news articles for 10,000+ public companies through entity recognition, along with a series of proprietary financial sentiment models to assess whether the news was positive or negative, as well as its significance and relevance to the company. We built a database containing over 1.5 million signals and operationalized the end-to-end ETL as a daily Workflow on Databricks. The development process included model training and selection. We utilized training data from our internal financial analysts to train Google’s T5-Flan to create our proprietary sentiment model and two additional models. Our models are deployed on Databricks Model-Serving as serverless endpoints that can be queried on-demand. The last phase of the project was to develop a UI, in which we utilized Databricks serverless SQL warehouses to surface this data in real-time.

Spark Connect, first included for SQL/DataFrame API in Apache Spark 3.4 and recently extended to MLlib in 4.0, introduced a new way to run Spark applications over a gRPC protocol. This has many benefits, including easier adoption for non-JVM clients, version independence from applications and increased stability and security of the associated Spark clusters. The recent Spark Connect extension for ML also included a plugin interface to configure enhanced server-side implementations of the MLlib algorithms when launching the server. In this talk, we shall demonstrate how this new interface, together with Spark SQL’s existing plugin interface, can be used with NVIDIA GPU-accelerated plugins for ML and SQL to enable no-code change, end-to-end GPU acceleration of Spark ETL and ML applications over Spark Connect, with optimal performance up to 9x at 80% cost reduction compared to CPU baselines.

Unlock the full potential of your BI tools with Databricks. This session explores how features like Photon, Databricks SQL, Liquid Clustering, AI/BI Genie and Publish to Power BI enhance performance, scalability and user experience. Learn how Databricks accelerates query performance, optimizes data layouts and integrates seamlessly with BI tools. Gain actionable insights and best practices to improve analytics efficiency, reduce latency and drive better decision-making. Whether migrating from a data warehouse or optimizing an existing setup, this talk provides the strategies to elevate your BI capabilities.

This session is repeated. If you are brand new to Databricks SQL and want to get a lightning tour of this intelligent data warehouse, this session is for you. Learn about the architecture of Databricks SQL. Then show how simple, streamlined interfaces are making it easier for analysts, developers, admins and business users to get their jobs done and questions answered. We’ll show how easy it is to create a warehouse, get data, transform it and build queries and dashboards. By the end of the session, you’ll be able to build a Databricks SQL warehouse in 5 minutes.

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.