Databricks

Databricks unites data lakes and warehouses into one lightning-fast Lakehouse. Built by Spark’s founders, it delivers ACID Delta tables, GPU-accelerated MLflow, and serverless SQL that scales to zero. Fortune 500 firms cut costs 40 %, slash fraud 30 %, and deploy LLMs in days, all under Unity Catalog’s cross-cloud governance.

1. Delta Live Tables (DLT)

DLT introduces declarative ETL pipelines. Engineers write simple SQL or Python statements; Databricks handles dependency graphs, retries, and quality constraints automatically. Expect up to 9 × faster development cycles versus hand-coded Spark jobs.

2. Serverless SQL Warehouses

Completely abstracted compute that starts in seconds, scales to zero, and bills per second of actual usage. Ideal for sporadic BI workloads and executive dashboards that must stay cost-efficient.

3. Feature Store & Feature Serving

A centralized registry for reusable features with point-and-click serving endpoints that guarantee sub-second latency for real-time ML models or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.

4. AutoML & Auto-Feature Engineering

With a single click, AutoML explores algorithms, hyper-parameters, and feature transformations; returns the best model registered in MLflow together with full explainability. Citizen data scientists report 60 % faster PoC-to-production times.