Alteryx & Databricks: Why Lake Houses Are Always Better

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Alteryx and Databricks have partnered to bring the POWER of the Lakehouse Architecture and Alteryx’s low code no-code solution to extract the maximum value from your data.

From lakes to streams, big data is awash with water metaphors, which makes sense. They both illicit visions of flow and action. Consider a lake house — the idea of looking out the window at a calm body of glassy water, while underneath the surface, all kinds of amazing things are happening — much like running your analytics on Databricks’ Lakehouse Architecture.

You have a visual of what a lake house is, but what is the Lakehouse Architecture and why should you care?

Let’s dive deeper (pun intended).

I think we can all agree that data is the primary building block of your analytics process. Organizations realize they have access to tons of wonderful data. This data is the key to making data-driven decisions. It has become more than a resource — it’s a strategic advantage.

In the past, your organization may have maintained proprietary data warehouses for BI workloads, and data lakes for data science and machine learning, often across multiple cloud platforms. This led to complicated, expensive architecture slowing down your ability to get value from their data.

Databricks Lakehouse Architecture provides a confluence for data-driven organizations. It combines the best qualities of data warehouses and data lakes to provide a solution for BI, Data Science, and AI processes.

Delta Lake, an open format storage layer, is the foundation of the lakehouse.

• It provides reliability and world-record-setting performance directly on your data lake — for both streaming and batch operation, and for structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• It gives you one single source of truth, with support for all data types and all use cases — BI, SQL, streaming, and machine learning — so data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and data stewards can unlock the potential of analytics and AI initiatives and collaborate on one simple data platform.
• Finally, it gives you the ability to easily and confidently share data across your organization, with partners, and with suppliers, while ensuring security and compliance.

Now where does Alteryx come into all of this?

Data democratization is a key initiative for our Data Connection team in 2022. For organizations to truly become data-driven enterprises, their analytics solution must support connectivity for all users. This means making data easier to access, easier to work with, and enables less technical users to work with data in their lakehouse.

With the 22.1 release, Alteryx has built new functionality in our In-DB tools to support reading and writing from Databricks’ Delta Lake and supports the advanced functions: Cloud Fetch architecture and Databricks SQL. These features are key enablers for any organization to ingest and prep large amounts of data by allowing users to read and write in parallel on Databricks, maximizing efficiency, scale, and value.

Databricks Links:
The Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Plan your Transition to the Lake House
Data Warehouse Meets Data Lakes