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Databricks
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Adaptive Instructed-Retriever: Frontier-Quality Search at 2x Lower Latency
Adaptive Instructed-Retriever addresses the tension between retrieval quality and latency for enterprise data agents, especially on multi-hop questions that benefit from sequential search. It combines parallel single-step retrieval with bounded multi-step search, using a fixed upper limit and an adaptive stopping policy that spends extra steps only when they are likely to improve results. The model is trained with online reinforcement learning using CISPO, a reward that balances trajectory quality against search cost, and synthetic multi-hop data alongside Instructed-Retriever-1 data. Across seven held-out internal and external benchmarks, it matches leading third-party and open-source models while answering in 5.8 seconds, reported as more than twice as fast as the compared alternatives, and substantially improves over single-step search. Varying the step penalty produces checkpoints spanning different quality-latency tradeoffs for production workloads.
Evaluation-First AI Agents: How Zepto Scales Customer Support on Databricks and MLflow
Zepto describes its customer-support system, processing more than 100,000 tickets daily, and the assurance problems that emerged as volume, categories, and customer behavior changed. Its response is an evaluation-first architecture on Databricks and MLflow, using development and production loops connected by a quality gate. Agent traces capture prompts, completions, retrieved documents, tool calls, latencies, and decision paths through MLflow, OpenTelemetry spans, and Unity Catalog-backed Delta tables; stakeholders define evaluation pillars and gates around a living golden dataset. The dataset grew from 500 examples with an eight-point development–production accuracy gap to 5,247 examples with a 0.4-point gap over six months, while prompt optimization and multiple scorers support iteration. Reported outcomes include 80% plus of tickets fully managed with human oversight, a 65% reduction in support cost or tickets, 20% higher CSAT, 8% better accuracy, and faster development and resolution.
SQL Data Types: Reference and Best Practices
SQL data types define what values columns accept, how those values are stored, and how databases process them, making type selection central to schema design. The reference covers numeric, character, date/time, and specialized types, noting that MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle differ in naming, precision, limits, and storage requirements. It recommends choosing the smallest type that safely accommodates expected values, checking range, precision, NULL requirements, string length, and time-zone needs before deployment. Examples contrast CHAR with VARCHAR, DECIMAL with FLOAT, DATE with TIMESTAMP, and integer sizes such as TINYINT, INT, and BIGINT; indexes and distributed engines also benefit from right-sized data. Sample data, execution-plan analysis, storage measurements, schema audits, and documentation help validate choices, identify waste or overflow risks, and preserve reasoning behind edge cases.
Build durable agents with Temporal and Lakebase
Long-running personal-loan underwriting agents must preserve completed work, resume after worker failures, tolerate repeated tool calls, wait for reviewers, expose operational state, and retain an audit trail. The reference implementation combines Temporal durable Workflows and Activities with Lakebase Postgres, using Temporal Event History for replay and Lakebase schemas for run status, evidence, review state, messages, and metrics. Deterministic identifiers, constraints, guarded updates, and Postgres upserts make repeated Activity attempts target the same logical records, while Signals carry human decisions and long waits do not occupy workers. A Unity Catalog synced table supplies governed underwriting policy, and optional Change Data Feed publishes operational changes to Delta history tables. The implementation includes a React/FastAPI interface, mocked deterministic providers, OAuth credential refresh, and 21 passing tests, but does not validate production lending, compliance, security, scale, or an observed end-to-end feed.
The 40-year-old database rule agents just broke: How LTAP unifies OLTP and OLAP workloads
LTAP (Lake Transactional/Analytical Processing) addresses the long-standing separation between operational row-oriented databases and analytical column-oriented systems, which traditionally required pipelines and copied data. It uses Lakebase’s stateless, ephemeral compute decoupled from durable lake storage to expose live operational data for analytical queries without moving it or loading the transaction-serving system. The storage layer preserves Postgres data types and physical representation while writing data into Parquet, with a hot row-format tier for operational access and a cooler columnar tier for analytical reads; Apache Spark and SQL can read that representation directly. By separating serverless operational and analytical compute, LTAP allows each workload to use specialized engines and independent capacity, while a unified catalog applies governance across both. The stated motivation is agentic workloads such as fraud detection, where stale copies miss fast events and uncontrolled analytical queries can degrade transactions.
Achieving Extreme Efficiency through Specialized GPU Kernel Generation
Production inference systems often use generic GPU kernels even though operation shapes combine static model parameters with request-time dimensions such as token counts. Proteus addresses this mismatch by having agents propose specialized kernels, then applying controlled-reference validation, static checks, isolated repeated timing, hidden tests, and consistency checks before retaining measured winners. Its knowledge layer uses actionable, scoped lessons retrieved through hierarchical tags and hybrid keyword-semantic search, while background jobs handle deeper distillation instead of burdening each attempt. On NVIDIA B200 GPUs with a Triton backend, a Gated DeltaNet packed-decode case for Qwen 3.5 122B produced shape-specific wins, including 1.6× for a Batch=4, Key=128, Value=128 path and 0.018 ms latency for Candidate 030. Across the reported kernels, Proteus achieved 1.8–5.2× speedups over the best available in vLLM, with validation and context management identified as the main difficulties.
Five ways marketers can use Genie One
Marketing teams often have data across campaign, customer, attribution, and pipeline systems but still depend on analysts to answer questions quickly and consistently. Databricks Genie One is presented as a data-smart AI coworker that uses governed business data, organizational context, metric definitions, campaign structures, reporting rules, and access permissions to support marketing analysis. The five described uses cover channel and campaign performance, funnel attribution, customer insights, omnichannel planning, and mobile business reporting, with natural-language follow-ups, reusable skills or Genie Agents, scheduled analyses, dashboards, and shareable outputs. Examples include tracing sourced pipeline changes, identifying declining enterprise-account usage, and finding territories with weakening repeat purchases. The source recommends starting with repeatable, cross-source workflows and preparing data sources, attribution models, fiscal-calendar logic, and team terminology in Databricks; marketers retain responsibility for decisions and campaign plans.
Governance beyond security: knowledge, context & ontology on the lakehouse
The post argues that healthcare AI governance must extend beyond security controls to include knowledge, context, and ontology: security governs access, while semantics determine what data means and whether models can trust it. DEP frames classification tags, model cards, data contracts, and lineage as machine-readable governance artifacts, with Unity Catalog serving as the metadata runtime for agents. Build agents can generate ETL, testing, de-identification, and deployment, while analytic agents answer questions over individual data products; human stewards approve proposals and own accountability. A shared lifecycle certifies the data product and AI track through gates using scores for governance, quality, semantics, and ownership, with certification expiring after relevant changes or failures. The approach applies data-layer ABAC to SQL and vector retrieval, logs agent prompts with lineage, and connects readiness metrics to model economics by enabling smaller models when cataloged data supplies sufficient context.
Building High-Quality and Trusted Data Products with Databricks
Enterprise data products are presented as managed assets that deliver the right data at the right time, with appropriate quality, format, and usability for users and applications. Their value depends on clear ownership, business-aware data product owners, and five trustworthiness characteristics: quality and observability, semantic consistency, privacy, security, and discoverability. The proposed lifecycle runs from inception and design through creation, publication, operation and governance, consumption, and retirement, with data contracts, quality metrics, testing, versioning, access management, and lineage supporting those stages. For Databricks implementations, the guidance recommends Delta Live Tables expectations and constraints, staged development, testing and production environments, automated monitoring, and Unity Catalog for discovery, governance, lineage, auditing, and access controls.
What is Data Transformation?
Data transformation turns raw data extracted from source systems into usable, trusted datasets for operational needs, analytics and decision-making. The process addresses inconsistencies, missing values and duplicates through techniques such as cleansing, de-duplication, integration, aggregation, validation and format revision, often mapping data to a target schema during ETL. Performance considerations include compaction, partitioning, file-size tuning, data skipping and pruning, and caching to reduce storage, scanning, processing time and latency. The article also compares on-premises, cloud, open-source, proprietary, no-code, low-code and codable ETL tools, then describes Spark Declarative Pipelines and Lakeflow Jobs on Databricks for quality checks, pipeline development, monitoring and orchestration. A Navy Federal Credit Union proof of concept illustrates a rapid deployment, with a proof of concept completed in a week and a dashboard released days after production deployment.
Southern Company’s SCOUT: Completing the Storm Intelligence Story
Southern Company’s SCOUT is a real-time storm operations application designed to make outage intelligence accessible beyond control-center desks during active events. Built on the Databricks lakehouse, it combines Delta Lake storage, Databricks Lakehouse warehouses, Unity Catalog governance, and collaborative notebooks, querying a dedicated warehouse every minute for current operational data. The mobile-friendly application unifies outage, customer, GIS, weather, terrain, crew, and reliability information, helping teams assess restoration times, assign appropriately equipped crews, coordinate mutual assistance, and communicate with customers. SCOUT is used across Southern Company’s operating businesses and had 1,139 adopted employees, including more than 250 users on a peak storm day; the source also describes exploration of AI crew recommendations and autonomous-drone integration, not a completed deployment.
Expanding Genie Agents: Deep analysis, file reasoning, and more
Genie Agents updates expand expert-curated business agents beyond quick factual lookups to deeper analysis across structured and unstructured data. Agent mode can create and refine research plans, issue iterative queries, and return reports with findings, visualizations, and citations; Agent mode APIs extend this workflow to custom applications, chatbots, scheduled reports, and internal tools through streaming Server-Sent Events. Agents can analyze PDFs, documents, slide decks, and images in Unity Catalog volumes alongside governed tables, with permissions and content search indexing applied to retrieval. Genie Code helps authors create baseline agents, diagnose conversation or benchmark failures, and identify knowledge gaps from user feedback, while authors retain review control over proposed changes. Shared chats keep follow-up messages and edited visualizations visible to authorized users, supporting collaboration and agent-quality review.
Announcing the Databricks Big Book of AgentOps
The Big Book of AgentOps presents AgentOps as an operating discipline for building, deploying and improving production AI agents, combining architecture, evaluation, observability, governance, security and cost management. It addresses the operational risks of tool calls, enterprise-data retrieval, API actions, retries and multi-step execution, where quality, permissions and spend can become difficult to control. The six-chapter book covers four agent architectures, four deployment patterns, a seven-phase lifecycle, DevOps practices, operationalization planning and stakeholder alignment, with Unity Catalog, Unity Gateway and MLflow central to its Databricks-based deployment guidance. Its practices include building evaluation datasets from real traces, calibrating automated judges with subject-matter-expert feedback, designing tracing and access controls into systems, and using RACI matrices to clarify ownership. The announcement cites customer examples including FactSet’s 44% accuracy improvement, DXC Technology’s 30% total-cost-of-ownership reduction, and ICE’s 77% syntactic accuracy and 96% execution matches.
How the FDA is building a secure, AI-ready data foundation on Databricks for Government
The FDA built HALO (Harmonized AI and Lifecycle Operations for Data) as a secure, governed, AI-ready enterprise data platform for modernizing siloed systems without interrupting regulatory work. Its move to Databricks on AWS GovCloud, following FedRAMP High authorization sponsorship, added Unity Catalog as a governance layer across a multi-tenant architecture, while Terraform-based security patterns, PrivateLink, customer-managed keys, and the compliance security profile support regulated workloads. The agency migrated more than 5,000 users and 8,000 jobs and pipelines with zero downtime, refactoring over 1,000 pipelines and 4,000 notebooks. After onboarding eight centers and 30 programs, FDA reported query responses improving over 30%, compute costs falling over 20%, and provisioning and sharing time dropping over 75%. HALO also supports responsible AI use cases such as MARS, with humans retaining decision authority.
How we eliminated $1 million a year of wasted AI agent spend in one hour
Databricks engineers investigated whether silent failures in MCP tool calls were driving hidden AI-agent costs as usage increased. Unity Gateway emitted OpenTelemetry traces for every invocation, recording tool names, arguments, errors, token counts, latency, and session IDs in a table that Genie One could query with plain-English questions. In a 24-hour sample, the analysis identified seven Jira and Google Drive/Docs bugs responsible for an estimated $499,000 annually in wasted tokens and 12,023 hours of agent wait time, or $1.2 million in lost productivity. The most costly patterns included under-specified interfaces, incompatible argument shapes, and cryptic or misleading errors that triggered retries and recovery loops. Engineers fixed the issues with a coding agent, completing the find-quantify-fix cycle in about an hour; the post recommends designing tools to tolerate reasonable LLM inputs and continuously tracing failures.
Collaboration makes us all stronger
An external researcher, Mehmet Ince, reported a memory-safety flaw in PostGIS’s address_standardizer extension, where caller-controlled grammar data indexed a fixed-size array without bounds checking. Because the extension was available to ordinary tenant roles on managed Postgres services, Databricks treated the issue as a platform exposure rather than a third-party problem, while noting that its microVM architecture meant the exploit did not produce cross-customer impact on Lakebase Postgres and Neon. Detection alerted the Neon team during testing, enabling rapid validation and downstream patching while a durable fix was developed and deployed to protect tenants without customer action. The upstream fix initially missed cases; Mehmet supplied the remaining pieces, and the complete correction was returned to PostGIS, with his bounty donated and matched for the project.
Operationalizing Genie Ontology in Your Data Stack
Genie Ontology is presented as a way to give enterprise AI agents shared business context beyond a semantic model, including definitions, relationships, business rules, authoritative sources, and permissions. It combines Unity Catalog Semantics—Metric Views, Pages, and Domains—with context inferred from governed tables, queries, dashboards, notebooks, and other supported assets. The guidance recommends six progressive layers, beginning with clean gold data and resolved golden records, then metadata, semantic modeling, enterprise context, governance, and evaluation. Critical implementation details include declaring informational primary and foreign keys, defining canonical measures in Metric Views, adding synonyms and example queries, and using permissions plus human-reviewed automation. Rather than waiting for complete coverage, it advises starting with one high-value domain and metric, then using feedback, telemetry, benchmarks, and drift reviews to strengthen trust over time.
The new Brickbuilder Partner Network tiers for ISVs and Data Providers are here
The Databricks Partner Network has launched Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum tiers for ISVs and data providers, with placement based on customer impact, technical excellence, strategic alignment, readiness and enablement, and joint go-to-market activity. Technical Excellence is evaluated through the Partner Well-Architected Framework (PWAF), which provides prescriptive, AI-ready guidance for secure, reliable integrations and serves as the standard for validated architecture. For customers, the tiers signal that a partner solution has met a high bar for architecture, security, compliance, and joint customer success, reducing vetting effort. For partners, each tier defines requirements and a roadmap tied to greater visibility, co-selling, and go-to-market support, while Databricks plans to refine the program and expand benefits over the coming months.
How Discovery Bank delivers hyper-personalized banking at scale: behavioral AI, governed data, and real-time decisioning
Discovery Bank’s hyper-personalized banking model addresses how to make interactions relevant to individual behavior while meeting financial-services demands for scale, speed, security, and governance. The bank combines demographic, transactional, digital-engagement, savings, borrowing, credit-risk, rewards, and lifestyle-related data on the Databricks Data and AI Platform, producing governed reusable features, indicators, scores, forecasts, and recommendations. Behavioral models and a reusable next-best-action decisioning layer support personalization, fraud detection, servicing, and banker assistance; TRUST alerts assess transactions against client-specific norms and can escalate from explanation to account locking. A four-layer architecture adds control services and specialized generative AI and agents to trusted data and analytical foundations, with governance remaining in the loop. Reported results include a 40% uplift in client engagement impact, 20x faster pipeline development and data processing, 5x faster data-product creation, more than 300 models built per day, and return on investment above 500%.
Autoscaling Lakebase Postgres
Lakebase Postgres addresses the waste and uncertainty of choosing a fixed database instance size before workload demand is known. Its decoupled architecture separates stateless compute from durable storage, allowing compute to start, stop, move, or resize without moving the database. The autoscaling algorithm combines CPU load, memory pressure, and a time-aware estimate of the Postgres working set, using modified HyperLogLog registers that store timestamps and estimate windows from one to 60 minutes. Scaling occurs live through autoscaler-agent, vm-monitor, Kubernetes scheduling, and NeonVM, with checks preventing unsafe downscales and scheduler approval for upscales. The system scales in both directions without dropping connections and operates across 100-millisecond, five-second, and 20-second timescales, including more than 32,000 resizes per month.
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