Databricks ❤️ IDEs

Happy Valentine's Day! Databricks ❤️ Visual Studio Code.

On this lovely day, we are thrilled to announce a new and powerful development experience for the Databricks Lakehouse Platform: the VS Code Extension for Databricks.

This new extension enables developers to write code locally, leveraging the powerful authoring capabilities of the IDE, while connecting to Databricks clusters to run code remotely. IDEs let developers employ best practices that become necessary with large codebases, such as source code control, modular code layouts, refactoring support, and integrated unit testing.

This will be the first of many planned releases for teams who rely on IDEs for their development process. Databricks is investing heavily in our developer ecosystem, and will be rolling out support for other IDEs and additional tools.

Check out a quick demo here, or read more below:

Develop natively inside VS Code

Build all of your data and AI applications while staying inside your IDE. You can author the code for your pipelines and jobs in VS Code, then deploy, test and run it in real-time on your Databricks cluster. Apply software development best practices and utilize VS Code's native capabilities for editing, refactoring, testing, and CI/CD for your data and AI projects.

"My team wants to run their data workloads on the Databricks Lakehouse but develop their data apps from their IDE. Now they can write code, edit, and test in their IDE and run their code on Databricks." – André Garrido, Head of Software Development for Data Processing at Kantar

The full power of the Databricks Lakehouse in your IDE

Now that you can build on Databricks within VS Code, you can perform all of your work in one location. Your Databricks objects can be managed inside VS Code natively with the new extension, allowing you to stay in your IDE and prevent context switching between applications. All of the Databricks components, such as clusters, pipelines, and tasks, are integrated into your VS Code workspace and regular workflow. You can utilize the Lakehouse's scale to process and analyze large data sets, use clusters for queries and visualizations, train machine learning models, and deploy jobs to production so that anyone in your organization can see and use data to make decisions, all within VS Code.

Uniquely designed to take advantage of full IDE capabilities

Get all the comforts of VS Code you are used to while building applications on Databricks. Navigate to function definitions, refactor, use advanced find-and-replace, and utilize split windows to drive your efficiency. Get code completion on functions and variables, including Databricks-specific objects, to speed up discovery and development.

With VS Code and Databricks, you can now utilize the software development best practices you already set up for your development process. Build and modularize different parts of your program across separate functions and files. Files are local, so you can use VS Code's Git tools and the git CLI. Modularize your code into files and libraries to encourage code reuse and improve hygiene. Use your preferred testing framework to ensure software quality. Integrate with top CI/CD tools to deliver your code into production faster.

"I find that the Databricks extension enables developers like me, who prefer an IDE, to be able to readily harness the power of VS Code with native and extensible functions while easily allowing me to run Databricks locally. Very helpful!" - Sam Walker, Data Engineer at Watco

A fully supported IDE experience

The new VS Code extension is directly available through the Visual Studio marketplace to streamline the acquisition experience and to ensure that you are getting an officially supported and trusted version from Databricks. We will be updating the extension regularly to provide experience and quality improvements for your peace of mind. You can also be assured that your investment is future-proof with added support for new capabilities of the Databricks Lakehouse platform as they get released.

"We consider it a huge advance that will further boost our development process, a milestone that certainly deserves to be celebrated and shared!" - Iago Brandão and Monica Borges, MLOps at ViaHub

Get Started with the VS Code Extension Today

The VS Code Extension is available today for download through the Visual Studio marketplace.

Download the VS Code Extension

Please take a look at our documentation for AWS, Azure, and GCP for help with how to get started using the extension, and give it a try.

We would love to hear your feedback at the Databricks Community about this extension or any other aspect of the development experience.

Stay tuned for further updates and improvements to the VS Code extension and support for other IDEs!