Solving the World’s Toughest Problems with the Growing Open Source Ecosystem and Databricks
We started Databricks in 2013 in a tiny little office in Berkeley with the belief that data has the potential to solve the world’s toughest problems. We entered 2020 as a global organization with over 1000 employees and a customer base spanning from two-person startups to Fortune 10s. In this blog post, let’s take a...
Processing Geospatial Data at Scale With Databricks
The evolution and convergence of technology has fueled a vibrant marketplace for timely and accurate geospatial data. Every day billions of handheld and IoT devices along with thousands of airborne and satellite remote sensing platforms generate hundreds of exabytes of location-aware data. This boom of geospatial big data combined with advancements in machine learning is...
Streamlining Variant Normalization on Large Genomic Datasets with Glow
Cross posted from the Glow blog. Many research and drug development projects in the genomics world involve large genomic variant data sets, the volume of which has been growing exponentially over the past decade. However, the tools to extract, transform, load (ETL) and analyze these data sets have not kept pace with this growth. Single-node...
New Databricks Integration for Jupyter Bridges Local and Remote Workflows
Introduction For many years now, data scientists have developed specific workflows on premises using local filesystem hierarchies, source code revision systems and CI/CD processes. On the other side, the available data is growing exponentially and new capabilities for data analysis and modeling are needed, for example, easily scalable storage, distributed computing systems or special hardware...
Deep Learning Tutorial Demonstrates How to Simplify Distributed Deep Learning Model Inference Using Delta Lake and Apache Spark™
On October 10th, our team hosted a live webinar—Simple Distributed Deep Learning Model Inference—with Xiangrui Meng, Software Engineer at Databricks. Model inference, unlike model training, is usually embarrassingly parallel and hence simple to distribute. However, in practice, complex data scenarios and compute infrastructure often make this "simple" task hard to do from data source to...
Scaling Hyperopt to Tune Machine Learning Models in Python
Try the Hyperopt notebook to reproduce the steps outlined below and watch our on-demand webinar to learn more. Hyperopt is one of the most popular open-source libraries for tuning Machine Learning models in Python. We’re excited to announce that Hyperopt 0.2.1 supports distributed tuning via Apache Spark. The new SparkTrials class allows you to scale out...
Delta Lake Now Hosted by the Linux Foundation to Become the Open Standard for Data Lakes
At today’s Spark + AI Summit Europe in Amsterdam, we announced that Delta Lake is becoming a Linux Foundation project. Together with the community, the project aims to establish an open standard for managing large amounts of data in data lakes. The Apache 2.0 software license remains unchanged. Delta Lake focuses on improving the reliability...
Simple, Reliable Upserts and Deletes on Delta Lake Tables using Python APIs
We are excited to announce the release of Delta Lake 0.4.0 which introduces Python APIs for manipulating and managing data in Delta tables. The key features in this release are: Python APIs for DML and utility operations (#89) - You can now use Python APIs to update/delete/merge data in Delta Lake tables and to run...
Parallelizing SAIGE Across Hundreds of Cores
As population genetics datasets grow exponentially, it is becoming impractical to work with genetic data without leveraging Apache Spark™. There are many ways to use Spark to derive novel insights into the role of genetic variation on disease processes. For example, Regeneron works directly on Spark SQL DataFrames, and the open-source Hail package can be...
Diving Into Delta Lake: Schema Enforcement & Evolution
Data, like our experiences, is always evolving and accumulating. To keep up, our mental models of the world must adapt to new data, some of which contains new dimensions - new ways of seeing things we had no conception of before. These mental models are not unlike a table's schema, defining how we categorize and...