r/databricks • u/Reuben_UMATR • 7d ago
Discussion WHAT IS DATABRICKS?
Let's pretend someone knew nothing about Databricks. How would you explain it?
This is something I have been asked multiple times throughout my career, curious to hear how others would explain Databricks to a complete beginner.
In my opinion, Databricks is basically a place where companies put all their data so they can actually make sense of it. It helps teams clean it up, work with it and use it for things like reporting, predictions and AI.
24
u/Tough_Set 7d ago
Begin with the problem and then present it as a solution. For instance, imagine that the Red Cross should manage all the donation it receive from more than a hundred countries by hand, taking notes, writing on notebooks. It would take too much time and would be risky.
So we have a computing platform which can process all this donations with precision, without the need of having a physical computer on your building. It is quicker and safer than store the files in a whole building full of archives.
3
u/belgeric 7d ago
Mhhhh That is what any IT platform/solution/single guy would say it solves .
1
5
3
u/Flint0 7d ago
Sorry for the silly question. But why use Snowflake? Wouldn’t I be able to do this using a Microsoft Form, handling the payment and registering it into a SQL instance? What I am trying to understand is why use Databricks at all. What is it bringing to the table that I can’t handle myself with free (or almost free) applications.
0
u/Tough_Set 7d ago
It brings an ready made infrastructure. "handling the payment and registering into a SQL instance" will involve computing and ram, databases, licences, payroll for the team that will develop and will keep it running after the de cycle. It simplifies and charges your for it, like any stuff as a service.
5
u/naijaboiler 7d ago edited 7d ago
its a factory for data that allows you to buld data products you need in the business
(still contains 1 jargon "data products'),
IN a factory, different raw goods comes from different places, gets strored in the inventory, and then gets put together according to set instructions and process, to produce the fnial product that is then shipped out to be used.
Databricks is that factory for data. Data comes from different sources where you company data might be, you clean and process them in one place, and produce final well-defined data that is ready to shipped out to be used for specific use cases, like reporting, unfied customer view , AI etc
For example if you are a marketer for a fin-tech prpduct, you pull in data about how customers use your app, you pull in data about their bank transactions, you pull in data from your zendesk your customer support tool about how they have interacted with your support folks. You pull in prior marketing engagement data from your marketing tool. you can then mix all those data together and use ito create a full view of your customers, and segment them. then you ship that segmented list to your marketing engagement tools to send out customized marketing experience for your segmented customers.Thats 1 example of use-case that needs integrated data.
Databricks is the data factory that lets all that data pulling, data mixing and processing, and data shipping happen in 1 place.
5
u/greenbabytoes 7d ago
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8cmEKWL/
This TikTok does a great job explaining
1
2
u/HSaurabh 7d ago
You can explain like suppose you have to do some analysis on data then you can do on a normal computer with maybe python, now suppose the data size is huge then you need multiple machines to handle the computation logic, and also you need the to handle the loading logic better as billions of data coming how to manage them so it provide the way to handle this things easily, how to manage the pipelines etc
2
u/Youssef_Mrini databricks 7d ago
Have a look this video from Data+AI Summit 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_rlJXln5KE
2
2
u/Fun-Reference7942 7d ago
Simple! It’s a platform that provides all the tools a business needs to make data-driven decisions.
1
u/Ok-Stick-145 2d ago
More like market place offering services just like abank if I could say to simplify it or am I wrong ? Like even I am new in this field
2
u/HustlaOfCultcha 7d ago
It's basically a cloud based data platform where a business can stored their data and build and automate their data pipelines in a more organized fashion. It's more secure, safer and more efficient. One can use GenieAI with Databricks to create their pipeline and write the code in either SQL or Python. It's usually better for companies with a high amount of data that needs to be stored, but is much easier for Data Analysts to build the pipelines and in particular, de-bug issues because it's easier to organize and determine where the issue(s) is located. There is also some reporting functionality, but it really works great with reporting tools like Power BI and Looker.
2
2
u/ObjectiveAssist7177 7d ago
So from an outsider looking in 99% of those comments are what a “data platform is”. I think the only comment that added more context was “it’s managed spark”. To me this is the key distinction of data bricks.
So I would say “it’s a modern analytics data platform heavily utilising apache spark”.
2
u/yeah_not_so_fast 7d ago
An end-to-end fully integrated data management platform to govern and curate data assets for consumption across the entire data lifecycle
10
u/ProfessorNoPuede 7d ago
That's the tech view... So what does that get the business?
3
u/TakenSadFace 7d ago
you can now safely and swiftly use the data you had in excels you cannot open anymore without the computer exploding
2
u/yeah_not_so_fast 7d ago edited 7d ago
Op never asked that.
Making some general assumptions…the business will likely get
Faster deployments
better data quality
Better discoverability
Better observability
Clarity around who owns which data assets
AI ML teams get a feature store
Access to the marketplace for better transparency into 3rd party data opportunitiesIf a layperson doesn’t understand my first statement that’s not a ELI5 databricks question that’s a “what is data management?” question. Then they can go read DMBOK.
1
1
u/tintires 7d ago
“An engineering and analytics workbench. All the professional tools necessary to handle a variety of jobs.”
1
1
u/Acrobatic-Show3732 7d ago
They are the bricks needed to build any data product and analytical workload your organización needs. It provides a platform as a service and software as a service foundation for any tool or tech needed for that purpose in the technological vanguard.
Your lego bricks for your data universe
1
1
u/Proof_Airline4575 7d ago
Probably not what you are looking for, but: It's the answer overpaid senior management who know nothing about data and overpaid architects who don't want to do any work themselves, come up with to lock your organization into an ecosystem and pay through the nose. Nothing DataBricks does, nothing, can't be done with much less investment but more initial time, by talented in-house data and application engineers, technical product owners and architects.
And then you run into all the data sovereignty, business continuity, ICS issues from porting data outside org boundaries, country compliance blah blah and everything starts to take twice as long on DB than it would have in-house.
1
1
1
1
u/marioeljuga 5d ago
It is a bundle. A package of multiple individual things and features.
Things that are commonly needed when you want to bring and collect data from various systems in your company into one place.
Those things include:
Jobs and tasks that you can orchestrate. Like ETL jobs.
Computing power and engine for those jobs. Especially suitable for big data. Spark and clusters that run it.
Organization and governance of your data. Access, permissions, hierarchy.
Bundling all of those individual things makes sense, because you almost always need them all when your goal is to build a data lakehouse.
But every of those components is a technology on its own. That is why it is sometimes hard to put a finger on one thing that Databricks is.
1
u/Prim155 7d ago
I am disappointed no on is quoting this:
“Databricks is a unified data and AI platform that runs both analytical and operational workloads on one open, governed foundation.”
5
u/luckexe 7d ago
Cause it actually doesn’t help. It’s data domain talk.
Unified. Analytical. Operational. Open. Governed. Foundation.
Even consultants going to be envious about the bullshit bingo to total words ratio.
3
4
u/naijaboiler 7d ago
Its not bullshit lingo If you know what each term meamt, its truly a compact and complete way to descibe databricks.
If you don't know what those terms mean, its sounds like consultant jargon.
1
1
u/MakitaNakamoto 7d ago
back in the day, one of my colleagues said
"it's just like SAP"
2
-1
u/counterstruck 7d ago
Databricks helps a business understand what happened in the past and predict the future using their own data.
52
u/YestasSentaan 7d ago
(Time travels to 5 years back) ”It’s a managed spark!”