Introducing Data Brick™: The Building Block of DataBricks' Unified Analytics Platform

Read Rise of the Data Lakehouse to explore why lakehouses are the data architecture of the future with the father of the data warehouse, Bill Inmon.

As a digital society built around data and devices, we have reached a pivotal juncture where data and Artificial Intelligence must be accessible to everyone. Riding this trend, many homes now contain smart devices such as the Amazon Echo or Google Home.

Yet these devices only offer limited computational power and AI capabilities. To remedy this problem, Databricks is proud to present the Data Brick™, a new all-in-one smart device that delivers the full power of Artificial Intelligence to every home.

The Data Brick is built to deliver exceptional sound. It excels at holding notebooks on a bookshelf or a workspace. It interconnects with all your home smart devices through a unified management console. And its language assistant Bricky is a polyglot, understanding verbal command in both natural and programming languages.

Massive Scalability

The Data Brick runs Apache Spark™, a powerful technology that seamlessly distributes AI computations across a network of other Data Bricks. The unique form factor of the Data Brick means that multiple Data Bricks can be stacked on top of each other, forming a rack of bricks like servers in a data center, and communicate with each other to execute workloads. However, even a single Data Brick contains multiple cores and up to 1 TB of memory, so most users will find that a few Data Bricks, placed at convenient locations throughout their home, are sufficient for their AI needs.

Voice Communication and Computation

Current smart speakers are limited to pre-programmed queries. In contrast, the Data Brick can support arbitrarily complex computations through Apache Spark. Bricky, its language assistant, supports spoken SQL, Scala, Python, and R. Users can simply speak queries to the Data Brick anywhere, and Bricky will deliver the answers. She will read from all your data sources and generate reports for the busy analysts or CTO.

The Future: Enabling A Next-Generation Cloud

The Data Brick can perform arbitrary computations because of its unique form factor and networking capability. We plan to release a new version of the DataBricks Unified Analytics Platform on a public cloud of Data Bricks, called the Brick Cloud, which represents the latest advance in modular datacenter design. The Brick Cloud will offer tremendous computing power in a small volume to answer questions faster than ever.

An artist's vision of the future Brick Cloud™. Credit: Nina Aldin Thune

At Databricks, we strive to make big data simple, and what is simpler than a Data Brick? The future is here and it is concrete. Try DataBricks today.

Have a wonderful April Fool’s Day!

Contributed by Tim Hunter, Nick Lee, Joy Xie, Jules Damji, and Reynold Xin, with special appearances from Alexandra Cong, Haoyi Li, Prakash Chockalingam, and Matei Zaharia.