On Demand Virtual Workshop: Predicting Churn to Improve Customer Retention
The proliferation of subscription models has increased across industries: from direct-to-consumer brands for shaving supplies and prepared meals to streaming media services, at-home fitness, auto insurance and even automobiles themselves. Consumers are flocking to these new offerings while moving away from long-term contracts, which for subscription-based businesses means they have to prove their value to...
Data with impact: A look back at the first Hackathon for Social Good
As global citizens, more and more businesses are investing in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs to help solve the issues of system social injustice and economic inequity highlighted by COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement. We’ve seen first-hand the incredible power of data to solve seemingly intractable problems and decided to launch our own...
Modern Industrial IoT Analytics on Azure – Part 1
This post and the three-part series about Industrial IoT analytics were jointly authored by Databricks and members of the Microsoft Cloud Solution Architecture team. We would like to thank Databricks Solutions Architect Samir Gupta and Microsoft Cloud Solution Architects Lana Koprivica and Hubert Dua for their contributions to this and the two forthcoming posts. The...
Announcing Support for Google BigQuery in Databricks Runtime 7.1
At Databricks, we are building a unified platform for data and AI. Data in enterprises lives in many locations, and Databricks excels at unifying data wherever it may reside. Today, we are happy to announce support for reading and writing data in Google BigQuery within Databricks Runtime 7.1. Introduction to BigQuery In Google’s own words,...
A look at the new Structured Streaming UI in Apache Spark™ 3.0
This is a guest community post from Genmao Yu, a software engineer at Alibaba. Structured Streaming was initially introduced in Apache Spark 2.0. It has proven to be the best platform for building distributed stream processing applications. The unification of SQL/Dataset/DataFrame APIs and Spark’s built-in functions makes it easy for developers to achieve their complex...
Industrial IoT Analytics with DeepIQ DataStudio and Databricks
A recent survey by Bain & Company shows that more than 30% of industrial companies are concerned about Information Technology and Operations Technology (IT&OT) integration. Another recent report by McKinsey & Company states that 70% of companies are still in “Pilot Purgatory” mode with industrial analytics projects, such as the use of the industrial internet...
A Comprehensive Look at Dates and Timestamps in Apache Spark™ 3.0
Apache Spark is a very popular tool for processing structured and unstructured data. When it comes to processing structured data, it supports many basic data types, like integer, long, double, string, etc. Spark also supports more complex data types, like the Date and Timestamp, which are often difficult for developers to understand. In this blog...
Optimizing User Defined Functions with Apache Spark™ and R in the Real World: Scaling Pitch Scenario Analysis with the Minnesota Twins Part 2
Introduction In part 1 we talked about how Baseball Operations for the Minnesota Twins wanted to run up to 20k simulations on 15 million historical pitches - 300 billion total simulations - to more accurately evaluate player performance. The idea is simple: if 15 million historical pitches sketched an image of player performance, 300 billion...
Bucket Brigade — Securing Public S3 Buckets
Are your Amazon S3 buckets secure? Do you know which ones are public or private? Do you even know which ones are supposed to be? Data breaches are expensive. Facebook notoriously exposed 540 million records of its users recently, which was a contributing factor of the $5 billion fine they were issued by the FTC....
Analyzing Customer Attrition in Subscription Models
Download the notebooks to demo the solution covered below The subscription model is experiencing a renaissance. Gone are the days of the penny music CD clubs, replaced by an ever-increasing assortment of digital streaming services delivering music, videos and more directly to consumers’ devices in exchange for a modest recurring fee. Today, 70% of US...
