Agile Data Lakehouses with Databricks and ADE

Databricks is one of the world's top manufacturers of high-performance platforms for data processing and analysis. However, building and maintaining them is a complex matter.

The perfect complement to your Databricks environment 

Agile Data Engine from ADE Insights Oy (ADE) is now a “Built On Databricks” Partner, offering an automation platform with seamless integration into the Databricks Cloud Data Lakehouse.  

Traditional problems in data warehousing 

When it comes to building and operating a data lakehouse, organizations frequently face a number of challenges:  

• High Maintenance Effort: As data volumes grow, managing schemas, dependencies, and data transformations manually becomes increasingly time-consuming. 

• Delayed Insights: Manual processes slow down the delivery of fresh data insights, hampering business agility and lowering trust in data. 

• Scaling Complexity: Ensuring that data models can scale while maintaining performance and cost-efficiency is a constant struggle. 

• Data Governance and Compliance: Managing governance and ensuring compliance across sprawling data ecosystems is resource-intensive. 

• Resource dependencies: Lack of qualified or dependence on specific resources continuously increases the risk of failure and or delayed availability of data.  

This is where the power of our partnership comes into play. Together with Databricks, we are able to help our customers to not only overcome these challenges but to also achieve significant cost savings along the way. How so? Let’s take a look. 

Databricks: A Unified Data Platform 

The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform democratizes access to analytics and intelligent applications by marrying customers’ data with powerful AI models tuned to the unique characteristics of their business. The platform is built on a lakehouse foundation of open data formats and open governance to ensure that all data is completely within the customers’ control. Key features like unity catalog for centralized governance and the platform's capabilities for predictive analytics and optimization workflows make it an ideal foundation for modern data applications.  

How Agile Data Engine enhances the experience 

As an all-in-one data warehouse automation platform, ADE automates all core processes in the data warehouse such as data modeling, transformations, workflows and delivery. Data teams can focus on delivering high-quality, actionable data instead of struggling with manual processes. The delivery of data products becomes more reliable and predictable while the risk of data pipeline failure is minimized. The platform is compatible with most common cloud databases, with Databricks being one of the most popular options. 

This is a valuable addition for Databricks. Agile Data Engine has been helping customers in Continental Europe over many years in building resilient data lakehouses. Based on the new partnership, the collaboration with Databricks will now be further intensified and the strengths of both platforms will be even more interlinked. ADE will in effect enhance the development, automation and provision of data lakehouses. Databricks customers can thus implement a modeled and multi-level medallion architecture for analytics and AI/ML use cases on Databricks SQL. 

Our team recently had the opportunity to demonstrate just how powerful this combination can be. We participated in the Data Vault challenge of the German Data Vault User Group. Performance and ease of operations vastly exceeded our expectations and we also thoroughly enjoyed working on the Databricks platform with its advanced features that complement and enhance the power of our platform. 

How ADE's Built on Databricks Partnership Enhances Your Data Strategy  

You might be wondering how you can benefit from this? Here are a few key points you should consider when selecting the right partners for your data platform:  

• Streamlined Delivery of Data Products: ADE automates the design and maintenance of your data lakehouse, while Databricks ensures efficient processing and storage of large datasets. Together, they create an end-to-end solution for building and managing data warehouses. 

• Optimized Performance: Databricks’ Predictive Optimization (PO) enhances ADE-managed data models by automating data layout optimizations. This boosts query performance and reduces storage costs, delivering measurable efficiency gains. 

• Accelerated Business Insights: The combination of ADE’s automation and Databricks’ AI/BI capabilities empowers business users to derive insights faster. For instance, Databricks AI/BI Genie, powered by unity catalog metadata, allows users to query data intuitively without technical expertise. 

• Scalable and Secure Data Sharing: The integration leverages Databricks’ global open ecosystem to enable seamless, secure sharing of data at scale, ensuring collaboration across teams and organizations.  

Realizing the Benefits - what this means for Databricks users with Agile Data Engine

By combining Agile Data Engine’s automation with Databricks’ robust analytics platform, businesses overcome the traditional challenges of data warehouse management.  

The improved efficiency through automation and optimization helps you realize benefits including: 

• Cost savings by reducing manual effort and optimizing data storage. 

• Faster Delivery of Insights: With ADE, data teams can rapidly deliver high-quality data to business users, accelerating decision-making. Setup and training is usually completed in a few business days. 

• Scalability and Adaptability: The platform ensures that data pipelines can grow alongside your business while maintaining optimal performance. 

• Integrated Governance: ADE supports seamless governance and compliance, making it easier to meet regulatory requirements. 

• Automation of Data Vault Modeling: ADE automates the creation and maintenance of scalable Data Vault models, reducing manual effort and increasing the reliability of your data architecture. 

• Facilitates transition: ADE speeds up significantly the migration process. It takes away managing the dependency complexity and migration can be done iteratively, block by block. Business results are delivered quickly, while building the data platform the solid way. Through automation and standardization it provides a smooth introduction to the Databricks world for the beginners or engineers specialized in different technologies.  

• Increased trust of stakeholders due the transparency of the data work. ADE sheds light on the black box of data platform development and operations.  

The "Built-On Databricks” partnership delivers: 

• Developing data solutions directly in Databricks SQL 

• Access to Databricks' development and support teams  

Ready to transform your data strategy and unlock the full potential of your data ecosystems?

Reach out to learn how Agile Data Engine and Databricks can help you learn how Agile Data Engine and Databricks can help you streamline your data warehouse and drive better business outcomes.