I’ve spent the last few weeks setting up the unity catalog for my company. It’s been an extremely tiring process. And there are several concepts to bring here. My main point is to have a clear view of the requirements. Disclaimer: as of today with https://github.com/databricks/terraform-provider-databricks release 1.17.0, some steps should be done in an “awkward way” that is, the account API does not expose the catalog’s endpoint and should be done through a workspace. Read more

Long time without writing! On highlights: I left my job at Schwarz IT in December last year, and now I’m a full-time employee at Wallbox! I’m really happy with my new job, and I’ve experienced interesting stuff. This one was just one of these strange cases where you start doubting the compiler. Context One of my main tables represents sensor measures from our chargers with millisecond precision. The numbers are quite high, we are talking over 2 billion rows per day. So the analytic model doesn’t handle that level of granularity. The analyst created a table that will make a window of 5 minutes, select some specific sensors and write there those values as a column. To keep the data consistent they were generating fake rows between sessions, so if a value was missing a synthetic value would be put in place. Read more

I was a bit skeptical about photon since I realized that it cost about double the amount of DBU, required specifically optimized machines and did not support UDFs (it was my main target). From the Databricks Official Docs: Limitations Does not support Spark Structured Streaming. Does not support UDFs. Does not support RDD APIs. Not expected to improve short-running queries (<2 seconds), for example, queries against small amounts of data. Photon runtime Read more

For the last few months, I’ve been into ETL optimization. Most of the changes were as dramatic as moving tables from ORC to delta revamping the partition strategy to some as simple as upgrading the runtime version to 10.4 so the ETL starts using low-shuffle merge. But at my job, we have a lot of jobs. Each ETL can be easily launched at *30 with different parameters so I wanted to dig into the most effective strategy for it. Read more

Firebase is a common component nowadays for most mobile apps. And it can provide some useful insights, for example in my previous company we used it to detect where the people left at the initial app wizard. (We could measure it). It is quite simple to export your data to BigQuery: https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/bigquery-export But maybe your lake is in AWS or Azure. In the next lines, I will try to explain how to load the data in your lake and some improvements we have applied. Read more