Databricks (the AI and data analytics company) announced that it was launching the SQL Analytics service to make it easy for data analysts to perform standard SQL queries directly on data lakes.
With this new capability, an enterprise will now connect their BI (Business Intelligence) tools like Microsoft’s Power BI and Tableau to the data lakes.
SQL Analytics will be available for public preview. Databricks has been working towards this goal for a while now. It is the breakthrough that takes the concept of ‘lake house’ and makes it real.
Tip: Databricks sees open-source as the way to innovate in data science
Stronger together
By combining a data warehouse’s performance, where data sits after it has been transformed and cleaned, and a data lake where the data sits unprocessed, SQL Analytics comes to life. The ‘data in the data lake’ is a concept from the company’s co-founder and CEO, Ali Ghodsi.
The data in the data lakes is usually transformed when it gets used. This makes data lakes cheaper but also challenging to handle for people trying to access them.
Ali says that the company has been asserting that Unified Data Analytics, which brings the data and the analytics together, calls for the two to be merged.
What ‘is’ and what ‘could be’
Ali continues to say that no one picked up on that, but ‘lake house’ caught on quickly as a term to describe the concept. Databricks has always been working to provide data science and machine learning.
With Databrick Spark’s release, data processing capabilities are offered in extraction, transformation, and loading.
With SQL Analytics, users will now be able to access the data warehousing workloads directly. The same applies to business intelligence and reporting workloads available on the data lake.
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