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Databricks SQL Now GA, Bringing Traditional BI to the Lakehouse Posted on : Dec 20 - 2021

Companies that want to run traditional enterprise BI workloads but don’t want to involve a traditional data warehouse may be interested in the new Databricks SQL service that became generally available yesterday.

The Databricks SQL service, which was first unveiled in November 2020, brings the ANSI SQL standard to bear on data that’s stored in data lakes. The offering allows customers to bring their favorite query, visualizations, and dashboards via established BI tools like Tableau, PowerBI, and Looker, and run them atop data stored in data lakes on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure (the company’s support for Google Cloud, which only became available 10 months ago, trails the two larger clouds).

Databricks SQL is a key component in the company’s ambition to construct a data lakehouse architecture that blends the best of data lakes, which are based on object storage systems, and traditional warehouses, including MPP-style, column-oriented relational databases.

By storing the unstructured data that’s typically used for AI projects alongside the more structured and refined data that is traditionally queried with BI tools, Databricks hopes to centralize data management processes and simplify data governance and quality enrichment tasks that so often trip up big data endeavors.

“Historically, data teams had to resort to a bifurcated architecture to run traditional BI and analytics workloads, copying subsets of the data already stored in their data lake to a legacy data warehouse,” Databricks employees wrote in a blog post yesterday on the company’s website. “Unfortunately, this led to the lock-in, high costs and complex governance inherent in proprietary architectures.”

Spark SQL has been a popular open source query engine for BI workloads for many years, and it has certainly been used by Databricks in customer engagements. But Databricks SQL represents a path forward beyond Spark SQL’s roots into the world of industry standard ANSI SQL. Databricks aims to make the migration to the new query engine easy. View More