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Databricks

Databricks Cloud users value its connectivity and compatibility with BI tools

Databricks Case Study Inline C4fab3174f4416e19b55ddeb601971b9

The Databricks story begins in Northern California: While at the University of California at Berkeley’s AMPLab data-analytics research center, then-PhD student Matei Zaharia and professor Ion Stoica decided that they could create a faster data-processing engine to overcome what they saw as performance limitations in the Hadoop data-access model. They built Spark, the open-source cluster- computing framework for Hadoop, open-sourced it in 2010, and turned it over to the Apache Software Foundation in 2013.

Later that year, the two—now re-titled as corporate CTO and CEO, respectively—joined with a cohort of their AMPLab colleagues to found Databricks and offer a commercial distribution for Spark, as well as related services. Along the way, they attracted interest, investment, and even a few board members from influential Silicon Valley venture capital firms NEA and Andreesen Horowitz. Databricks’ mission was funded, unambiguous, and ambitious: Revolutionize how data analysts could extract more value from Big Data.

Key Requirements

  • ODBC connectivity
  • Direct SQL-to-Spark capability
  • Extensibility
  • Windows, Linux, and Mac platform support

Challenges

Spark offers massive data-processing performance improvement (up to 100x) over MapReduce. The Databricks suite of offerings has grown to include the Databricks Cloud platform supported with Spark SQL (which supplanted Shark).

But as they assessed the data analytics market space, Stoica, Zaharia, and team realized that Spark—no matter the performance—would succeed only if analysts could access Spark data using their preferred BI tools and methods.

“The second you try to tell people that they need to change their tools to use their underlying data store, you’ve lost,” observes Databricks’ Customer Engagement Lead, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji. “It was a no-brainer for us: If we want to get adoption going forward, we need to support these tools. It’s just table stakes.”

Solution

That realization meant ensuring Spark ODBC connectivity to BI tools like Tableau, Excel, Microstrategy, Qlik, and others. More importantly, those target analysts needed to be able to get at Spark data using the data-query approach with which they were most familiar: SQL. And that led Databricks to Magnitude.

“When you look at the marketplace … [when] you talk to any of the people in the space, Simba is the answer if you want to provide that connectivity,” explains Tavakoli-Shiraji.

Databricks selected Magnitude to provide its ODBC 3.8 Data Connector for Databricks Spark SQL, its powerful SQL-query engine for Apache Spark. Databricks now includes the driver free of charge in its Databricks Cloud platform. For Databricks, the Simba ODBC Data Connector enables Databricks customers to query their Spark data with their preferred BI tool (like Tableau, Excel, Qlik, MicroStrategy, or others) on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

“One of the top most-requested features for Databricks Cloud is ‘Plug in my BI tools to work with this,’” says Tavakoli-Shiraji. “What’s the simplest way to get people going? It’s ODBC connectivity [from Simba]. It’s there, it’s stable, it works.”

Next Up: Extensibility

A development quick-turn turned into a valuable “big deal” for Databricks, and reinforced the company’s commitment to Magnitude.

“Tableau Software said to us, ‘We want to release a Mac Spark driver in short order,’ explains Tavakoli-Shiraji. “So we called Magnitude.” The Magnitude dev team quickly extended the Databricks Spark ODBC Data Connector to Tableau for the Mac. Partner reaction was immediate (and positive). “Even Tableau was surprised they could deliver both Windows and Mac drivers at launch,” continues Tavakoli-Shiraji. “The fact that we could make something like that happen quickly … was terrific.”

Tavakoli-Shiraji concludes that Databricks Cloud users value its connectivity and compatibility with BI tools: “We’ve knocked down the barriers for less-technical users to be able to work with their data, even if they don’t know about all the complexities that are being abstracted under the covers.”

The Simba-developed Databricks ODBC Driver is available from Databricks. Learn more at http://www.databricks.com.

When you look at the marketplace... [when] you talk to any of the people in the space, Magnitude Simba is the answer if you want to provide that connectivity.

Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji Customer Engagement Lead

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