How to Work with Avro, Kafka, and Schema Registry in Databricks
In the previous blog post, we introduced the new built-in Apache Avro data source in Apache Spark and explained how you can use it to build streaming data pipelines with the from_avro and to_avro functions. Apache Kafka and Apache Avro are commonly used to build a scalable and near-real-time data pipeline. In this blog post,...
Databricks Runtime 5.2 ML Features Multi-GPU Workflow, Pregel API, and Performant GraphFrames
We are excited to announce the release of Databricks Runtime 5.2 for Machine Learning. This release includes several new features and performance improvements to help developers easily use machine learning on the Databricks Unified Analytics Platform. Continuing our efforts to make developers’ lives easy to build deep learning applications, this release includes the following features...
5 Reasons to Become an Apache Spark Expert
Apache Spark™ has fast become the most popular unified analytics engine for big data and machine learning. It was originally developed at UC Berkeley in 2009 by the team who later founded Databricks. Since its release, Apache Spark has seen rapid adoption. Today’s most cutting-edge companies such as Apple, Netflix, Facebook, and Uber have deployed Spark...
Apparate: Managing Libraries in Databricks with CI/CD
This is a guest blog from Hanna Torrence, Data Scientist at ShopRunner. Introduction As leveraging data becomes a more vital component of organizations' tech stacks, it becomes increasingly important for data teams to make use of software engineering best-practices. The Databricks platform provides excellent tools for exploratory Apache Spark workflows in notebooks as well as...
Kicking Off 2019 with an MLflow User Survey
It’s been six months since we launched MLflow, an open source platform to manage the machine learning lifecycle, and the project has been moving quickly since then. MLflow fills a role that hasn’t been served well in the open source community so far: managing the development lifecycle for ML, including tracking experiments and metrics, building...
Introducing Databricks Runtime 5.1 for Machine Learning
Last week, we released Databricks Runtime 5.1 Beta for Machine Learning. As part of our commitment to provide developers with the latest deep learning frameworks, this release includes the best of these libraries. In particular, our PyTorch addition makes it simple for a developer to simply import the appropriate Python torch modules and start coding,...
MLflow v0.8.1 Features Faster Experiment UI and Enhanced Python Model
MLflow v0.8.1 was released this week. It introduces several UI enhancements, including faster load times for thousands of runs and improved responsiveness when navigating runs with many metrics and parameters. Additionally, it expands support for evaluating Python models as Apache Spark UDFs and automatically captures model dependencies as Conda environments. Now available on PyPI and...
Introducing Built-in Image Data Source in Apache Spark 2.4
Introduction With recent advances in deep learning frameworks for image classification and object detection, the demand for standard image processing in Apache Spark has never been greater. Image handling and preprocessing have their specific challenges - for example, images come in different formats (eg., jpeg, png, etc.), sizes, and color schemes, and there is no...
Apache Avro as a Built-in Data Source in Apache Spark 2.4
Apache Avro is a popular data serialization format. It is widely used in the Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop ecosystem, especially for Kafka-based data pipelines. Starting from Apache Spark 2.4 release, Spark provides built-in support for reading and writing Avro data. The new built-in spark-avro module is originally from Databricks’ open source project Avro Data...
Announcing Databricks Runtime 5.0
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Databricks Runtime 5.0. Included in this release is Spark 2.4. This release offers substantial performance increases within key areas of the platform. Benchmarking workloads have shown a 16% improvement in total execution time and Databricks Delta benefits from substantial improvements to metadata caching, improving query latency by...
