---
title: "Databricks"
description: "Data and AI platform for data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI."
---

# Databricks
> Data and AI platform for data engineering, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI.

## Articles

### [Introducing the Databricks Excel add-in for business users](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-the-databricks-excel-add-in-for-business-users.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Toussaint Webb, Kaitlin Baumgardner
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

Databricks has introduced the Excel Add-in, now in public preview, to let business users import and analyze lakehouse data directly in Excel without writing SQL or configuring ODBC drivers. Built on Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog, it provides point-and-click access to tables and metric views, native Excel pivot tables, refreshable results, reusable Workspace queries, and optional saved SQL. Metric views let data teams define business semantics once while Unity Catalog centrally manages permissions and controls, helping avoid duplicated logic and metric drift. The preview supports selecting tables and metric views, parameterized custom functions, manual refreshes, pivot-table filtering, query reuse, and workspace changes; scheduled refresh, AI integrations, and other usability improvements are planned next.


### [Building an Enterprise Data Management Strategy](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-an-enterprise-data-management-strategy.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

Enterprise data management (EDM) is presented as an organizational capability for governing, integrating, securing, and operationalizing data across its lifecycle as volumes and regulatory scrutiny increase. The strategy addresses silos, inconsistent schemas, undocumented transformations, compliance exposure, and the difficulty of supporting analytics and AI across fragmented systems. It combines governance councils and ownership, automated profiling and quality thresholds, classification with RBAC and encryption, reusable ETL/ELT pipelines, lineage tracking, and architecture choices such as lakehouses and medallion patterns. Unity Catalog is described as a unified governance layer for reads and writes across open formats including Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, while federation can provide access to external catalogs without copying data. Execution begins with cross-functional sponsorship, a high-impact pilot, measurable KPIs, and quarterly reviews; the source frames EDM as continuous rather than one-time work.


### [Real-Time Decisioning for AI Agents: Why you Need a Customer Context Layer First](https://yomu.fyi/post/real-time-decisioning-for-ai-agents-why-you-need-a-customer-context-la.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Alex Dean
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

Real-time decisioning for AI agents depends on more than customer records: it requires a customer context layer that captures what people are doing now and connects that behavior to identity. The post positions the data platform as the center of a composable martech architecture, with agents and applications operating on shared data in open formats such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake. Snowplow’s described approach places structured event collection, schema validation, enrichment, and identity resolution before data reaches the platform, while operating in the customer’s cloud environment. It distinguishes historical profiles from granular behavioral event streams and argues that agent interaction outcomes should return to the foundation as first-class events. The resulting four-stage loop—collect, resolve and enrich, serve, and learn—supports simultaneous real-time and historical context, with decision quality dependent on source data coherence.


### [A Practical Guide to LLM Fine Tuning](https://yomu.fyi/post/a-practical-guide-to-llm-fine-tuning.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

The guide presents LLM fine tuning as a way to adapt a pre-trained model to specific tasks, domains, or applications without full pretraining. It explains when prompting or few-shot learning is sufficient and when fine tuning is justified by quality gaps, domain terminology, latency, cost, or behavioral control. The recommended lifecycle covers scoping, data collection and cleaning, base-model and method selection, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring, with production-format consistency and held-out splits treated as important safeguards. It compares supervised and full fine tuning with parameter-efficient fine tuning (PEFT), including LoRA and QLoRA, which update fewer parameters and reduce compute and memory requirements. The main risks are noisy data, overfitting, and catastrophic forgetting; the proposed default is a pilot that compares a PEFT-adapted model with its base model, while combining fine tuning with RAG and prompt engineering when appropriate.


### [AI Data Transformation Guide for Data Engineers and Data Scientists](https://yomu.fyi/post/ai-data-transformation-guide-for-data-engineers-and-data-scientists.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

AI data transformation converts raw source data into clean, structured formats for analytics, reporting, and AI systems, while this guide describes production workflows for data engineers and data scientists. It covers discovery and profiling, documented cleaning rules, source-to-target mapping, lineage, AI-generated SQL or Python, validation, testing, and governance. Human review remains required before AI-generated code reaches production, and the guide recommends versioning scripts with datasets, monitoring drift, and involving data scientists in field mapping early. It also compares ETL, which transforms before loading, with ELT, which transforms inside the warehouse, and recommends piloting one representative workflow before broader rollout. The stated goals are reducing repetitive work, improving data quality early, and delivering analysis-ready outputs without manual fixes.


### [Concurrency Control in DBMS: How Locking, MVCC and Optimistic Strategies Keep Data Consistent](https://yomu.fyi/post/concurrency-control-in-dbms-how-locking-mvcc-and-optimistic-strategies.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

The guide explains how database management systems coordinate simultaneous transactions to preserve consistency and serializability, preventing dirty reads, lost updates, non-repeatable reads and phantom reads. It compares lock-based control, including shared and exclusive locks and two-phase locking, with MVCC, which gives transactions consistent snapshots and lets readers and writers proceed without blocking. The discussion covers pessimistic and optimistic strategies, isolation levels, deadlocks, retries, lock-granularity trade-offs and MVCC’s storage and garbage-collection costs, including PostgreSQL’s VACUUM. For lakehouse workloads, Delta Lake uses a read-validate-commit process with optimistic concurrency, snapshot isolation and conflict detection for concurrent writes. The source presents Databricks Lakebase as a managed implementation offering optimistic concurrency control, snapshot isolation for reads and write-serializable isolation for writes without lock or deadlock management.


### [LLM apps: Real-world use cases, core building blocks and risks to know](https://yomu.fyi/post/llm-apps-real-world-use-cases-core-building-blocks-and-risks-to-know.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 21, 2026

LLM applications are presented as production systems that extend beyond chatbots by connecting foundation models to external data, tools, APIs, memory and workflows. Modern categories include assistants and copilots, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), autonomous agents, multi-agent systems and local or on-device inference, each with distinct capabilities and trade-offs. A typical RAG pipeline uses vector search over a curated knowledge base, then supplies retrieved passages to the model; chunking, source freshness and retrieval accuracy affect results. Production systems also require orchestration, evaluation, observability, governance, guardrails, audit trails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints, especially when agents can call tools or execute workflows. The source distinguishes prompt engineering, which guides behavior without changing model weights, from fine-tuning, which adapts models to domain-specific tasks, and describes a unified path combining data, models, retrieval, orchestration, evaluation and governance for production deployment.


### [From Static Policies to Autonomous Insurance: How AI enables Real-Time Coverage](https://yomu.fyi/post/from-static-policies-to-autonomous-insurance-how-ai-enables-real-time.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Amee Vora, Anindita Mahapatra, Marcela Granados
- Published: Apr 20, 2026

Insurance products often rely on annual pricing, periodic risk assessment, and coverage changes tied to major life events, even though driving behavior, digital fraud exposure, and travel risk can change in seconds. The post presents embedded insurance and usage-based insurance as a shift toward contextual, just-in-time coverage delivered through apps, checkout flows, vehicle purchases, and partner platforms. Its automotive example combines telematics, geospatial data, and real-time weather signals to update risk scores and premiums from trip behavior such as braking, following distance, mileage, location, and environmental conditions. A Databricks Lakehouse architecture registers devices, ingests telemetry through Zerobus, curates data in a governed Medallion architecture, and exposes features through Lakebase and Databricks One, with Unity Catalog supporting access controls, lineage, explainability, and audit trails. The proposed trajectory leads from embedded coverage toward autonomous insurance whose policies continuously adapt to risk.


### [Bridging data science and marketing: Databricks unveils Delta Sharing integration for Adobe Experience Platform and agentic marketing workflows](https://yomu.fyi/post/bridging-data-science-and-marketing-databricks-unveils-delta-sharing-i.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Justin Fenton, Dan Zuckerberg, Katy Yuan
- Published: Apr 20, 2026

Databricks and Adobe announce three partnership milestones aimed at connecting governed Lakehouse data with marketing activation in Adobe Experience Platform. The changes include Delta Sharing support for zero-copy access, a Databricks Genie connection to Adobe Marketing Agent through Model Context Protocol (MCP), and an upcoming Adobe Marketing Agent beta for the Databricks Marketplace. Using Unity Catalog as the source, Experience Platform can access shared tables and views as virtual tables, while Adobe Data Distiller queries live Databricks data without copying underlying records. Through MCP, agents in both platforms can use governed datasets, metadata, models, campaign metrics, SQL Warehouses, and Model Serving endpoints with natural-language interactions. The stated outcome is a shared, real-time context for audience creation, campaign analysis, closed-loop attribution, and model improvement, while reducing data movement, duplication, latency, egress, and governance overhead.


### [Take Control: Customer-Managed Keys for Lakebase Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/post/take-control-customer-managed-keys-for-lakebase-postgres.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Ben Hagan
- Published: Apr 20, 2026

Lakebase Customer Managed Keys (CMK) gives regulated enterprises control of the root of trust through customer-owned keys from AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, or Google Cloud KMS. Because Lakebase separates persistent storage from elastic Postgres compute that can scale to zero, CMK protects both layers and their caches rather than storage alone. Its hierarchical envelope-encryption model uses the CMK as the root, transient Key Encryption Keys (KEKs) to wrap Data Encryption Keys (DEKs), and unique DEKs for each data segment, while plaintext CMKs remain in the customer’s KMS. Account Admins bind a configured key to a workspace, after which new projects inherit the CMK; rotation needs no re-encryption or downtime, revocation terminates compute instances, and audit services record cryptographic operations.


### [Get hands-on with agents, vibe coding and more at Data+ AI Summit](https://yomu.fyi/post/get-hands-on-with-agents-vibe-coding-and-more-at-data-ai-summit.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Pratyarth Rao
- Published: Apr 20, 2026

Data + AI Summit returns to San Francisco from June 14 through June 18, 2026, with Databricks Training and Certification offering more than 20 hands-on courses across AI agents, vibe coding, data engineering, and Lakebase. Training-exclusive days on Sunday and Monday are designed to provide dedicated learning time, while sessions continue during the conference week. New courses cover agentic development with Genie Code, Claude Code, Cursor, MCP servers, and structured prompting; production agent deployment with MLflow’s ResponsesAgent framework and tracing; Lakeflow Spark Declarative Pipelines; and AI/BI dashboards and Genie Spaces. Onsite certification exams cost $100 plus taxes, a 50% discount, and seven listed exams are available. The Learning Hub adds labs, skills assessments, customized learning plans, and community access.


### [Mercedes-Benz builds a cross-cloud data mesh with Delta Sharing and intelligent replication, cutting costs by 66%](https://yomu.fyi/post/mercedes-benz-builds-a-cross-cloud-data-mesh-with-delta-sharing-and-in.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Alexander Summa, Aleksandar Dragojevic
- Published: Apr 20, 2026

Mercedes-Benz built a cross-cloud data mesh to share after-sales data between AWS and Azure while supporting its data-defined vehicle strategy. Existing direct queries incurred egress costs, and weekly full loads delayed updates for datasets that included vehicle over-the-air events and workshop visits; source tables were in Iceberg while many consumers expected Delta. Using Unity Catalog and Delta Sharing, the company federated AWS Glue tables, established cross-metastore shares, and used periodic serverless Sync Jobs with Delta Deep Clone to incrementally replicate selected tables into Azure object storage for local querying. This hybrid model preserves direct sharing for fresher workloads while reducing transfer for less time-sensitive ones. For the initial ten data products, egress costs fell 66%, update frequency improved from weekly to every second day, and the source reports an approximately 93% annual reduction in its 50-use-case comparison.


### [What Is a Transactional Database?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-is-a-transactional-database.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 20, 2026

Transactional databases handle large volumes of short, real-time read and write operations for systems such as orders, payments, account balances, and customer records. They support online transaction processing (OLTP) by treating related steps as one logical unit: successful work commits, while failures roll back the full transaction. ACID—atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability—protects integrity under concurrency and failures, with row-oriented storage optimized for individual-record access, locking and isolation levels coordinating concurrent work, and write-ahead logging (WAL) supporting crash recovery. The source positions these databases as foundations for banking, e-commerce, healthcare, reservations, and telecommunications, while noting that row-oriented execution is less suitable for large analytical workloads and that horizontal scaling is more complex than in distributed NoSQL systems.


### [Introducing Genie Agent Mode](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-genie-agent-mode.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Hanlin Sun
- Published: Apr 17, 2026

Databricks introduces Agent mode in Genie spaces, an agentic process that plans, explores, and reasons over data to answer business questions. For each question, Genie can confirm an issue, test potential contributors through multiple queries, reflect on results, and decide what to investigate next, using Unity Catalog metadata and author-defined semantics from the Genie space. It produces a findings report with quantified results, identified contributors, visualizations, and references to the underlying SQL, and may include actionable recommendations. The agent scales its reasoning to task complexity, using validation for straightforward questions and more planning for multi-step investigations; in AI/BI Dashboards, Genie uses Agent mode by default. Workspace admins enable the feature in Workspace Previews, after which users turn on the Agent toggle in Genie spaces; API support and unstructured document analysis are planned additions.


### [Governing coding agent sprawl with Unity AI Gateway](https://yomu.fyi/post/governing-coding-agent-sprawl-with-unity-ai-gateway.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Aarushi Shah, Ankit Mathur, Bilal, Kevin Stumpf, Rohit Agrawal, Harish Gaur, Ana Nieto
- Published: Apr 17, 2026

Databricks introduces coding agent support in Unity AI Gateway to address security, cost, and visibility challenges created by organizations using multiple coding tools. The gateway provides a unified governance hub for Codex, Cursor, and Gemini CLI, combining access controls, usage statistics, operational observability, cost management, guardrails, and inference capacity. Agent access can be governed centrally, with audit logs in Unity Catalog, MCP servers managed in Databricks, MLflow tracing, shared cost limits, and coding metrics and traces ingested into Unity Catalog-managed Delta tables through OpenTelemetry. The announcement says developers can authenticate with Databricks credentials across connected services, use centralized budgets and model capacity, and let organizations analyze adoption, developer velocity, and rate-limit pressure in the lakehouse; support for Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI is available to all Databricks customers.


### [What is pgvector?](https://yomu.fyi/post/what-is-pgvector.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Databricks Staff
- Published: Apr 17, 2026

pgvector is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that adds vector storage, indexing, and similarity search for embeddings alongside relational application data. It supports semantic search, recommendations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), image similarity, anomaly detection, and deduplication without requiring a separate vector database for many workloads. The extension uses the vector data type and distance metrics including L2, cosine similarity, and inner product, with HNSW and IVFFlat indexes offering different speed and memory trade-offs. Vector queries can also combine relational filters with Postgres full-text search for hybrid retrieval. pgvector is positioned as a practical choice for existing Postgres deployments, while pgvectorscale can extend its usefulness as data and query demands grow; dedicated vector databases become more relevant at larger scales, and Databricks AI Search serves complementary lakehouse workloads.


### [Banks don't have an AI problem — they have a data platform problem](https://yomu.fyi/post/banks-don-t-have-an-ai-problem-they-have-a-data-platform-problem.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Naeem Rehman, Jennifer Miller
- Published: Apr 17, 2026

The post argues that banks’ difficulty scaling AI stems less from model capability than from fragmented data, weak governance, and limited real-time access. Examples from CBA Live 2026 include model drift in credit scoring, fragmented customer signals, and a collections model that predicted, with 85% accuracy, how many days newly delinquent accounts would take to cure using governed data. It also presents Erica’s 3.2 billion interactions since 2018 as evidence that production AI requires continuous tuning, monitoring, and edge-case management, while generic models decay in frontline settings. The proposed Databricks architecture combines Lakehouse, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, Lakebase, MLflow, Model Monitoring, Online Feature Store, Genie, and Agent Bricks to support governed analytics, low-latency decisions, auditable models, and constrained agent actions. Its conclusion is that a shared data platform should precede additional AI use cases because it improves deployment speed, trust, explainability, and regulatory defensibility.


### [Open Platform, Unified Pipelines: Why dbt on Databricks is Accelerating](https://yomu.fyi/post/open-platform-unified-pipelines-why-dbt-on-databricks-is-accelerating.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Srilekha Dornadula, Ramiz Bozai
- Published: Apr 16, 2026

dbt provides structure for transforming raw data into curated datasets, but the post argues that its effectiveness depends on the underlying platform. Databricks is presented as an open lakehouse combining storage, compute, governance, orchestration, and monitoring to reduce duplicated data, fragmented permissions, and operational overhead. Lakeflow Jobs runs dbt alongside ingestion, downstream actions, retries, and dependencies, while Unity Catalog supplies persistent permissions, documentation, lineage, and fine-grained controls. The integration also supports Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, query tags for cost tracking, Photon, Predictive Optimization, Liquid Clustering, and dbt materialized views. The post concludes these capabilities provide openness, integrated operations, governance, and price-performance for dbt workflows, citing one customer’s consolidation of notebooks and 7+ source systems and more than 2,900 customers already running dbt on Databricks.


### [Why your agents can't read enterprise documents — and how to fix it](https://yomu.fyi/post/why-your-agents-can-t-read-enterprise-documents-and-how-to-fix-it.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Archika Dogra, Sergei Tsarev, Erich Elsen
- Published: Apr 16, 2026

Enterprise agents often reason well over clean text but struggle with scanned PDFs, inconsistent layouts, nested tables, images, and handwriting, making document processing an accuracy ceiling for business workflows. The post announces Document Intelligence, a pipeline of chainable AI Functions: ai\_parse\_document converts scans into layout-enriched structured text, while ai\_classify and ai\_extract support routing and entity extraction. On OfficeQA treasury-bond documents, preprocessing with ai\_parse\_document produced a 16% average performance gain across tested agent frameworks without changing their reasoning harness. Across invoice, contract, medical-note, and financial-filing extraction tasks, it reportedly delivered the highest accuracy at 5–7x lower cost than comparable pipelines, with serverless batch infrastructure scaling the same SQL call from 100 to 100,000. Databricks integrates ingestion, orchestration, governance, and agent building through Lakeflow Connect, Lakeflow Jobs or Spark Declarative Pipelines, Unity Catalog, and Agent Bricks, aiming to replace fragmented services with reusable workflows.


### [Building with Databricks Document Intelligence and Lakeflow](https://yomu.fyi/post/building-with-databricks-document-intelligence-and-lakeflow.md)
- Company: [Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks.md)
- Author: Giselle Goicochea, Joanna Zouhour
- Published: Apr 16, 2026

The post presents a production-oriented approach to Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) that brings PDFs, images, and office documents into Databricks’ governed data lifecycle. Lakeflow Connect ingests files from sources such as SharePoint and Google Drive into Unity Catalog Volumes and tables, applying access control, lineage, and auditing while supporting incremental reads and writes. Databricks’ Document Intelligence then uses ai\_parse\_document to preserve structure in VARIANT output, with ai\_extract, ai\_classify, and ai\_prep\_search available for enrichment, routing, and retrieval preparation. Lakeflow Jobs productionizes the workflow with orchestration, control flow, retries, triggers, serverless scaling, and observability across ingestion, parsing, and serving tasks. The post also recommends joining extracted data to master data, using service principals, and monitoring drift and extraction accuracy, presenting the combined platform as a way to create trusted, queryable datasets from unstructured content.


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