Expanded AtScale, Databricks integration adds functionality
AtScale launched an expanded integration with Databricks that includes support for Databricks SQL and Unity Catalog as well as availability in Partner Connect.
Founded in 2013 and based in Boston, AtScale offers a semantic layer platform aimed at helping organizations easily organize and access their data to speed up the process of reaching insights that lead to business decisions.
Past platform updates have marked AtScale’s move into data virtualization and expanded cloud-native capabilities.
Databricks, founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco, is a data lakehouse vendor whose platform combines the structured data storage capabilities of a data warehouse with the unstructured data storage capabilities of a data lake.
Over the past year, Databricks has been adding lakehouses specially geared toward certain industries to enable organizations in those industries to more easily get started using the vendor’s platform. Among them, Databricks has launched lakehouses for financial services, healthcare, media and entertainment, and retail.
Databricks’ Unity Catalog is a data catalog that enables organizations to put data governance and lineage measures in place. It was made generally available in June 2022. Databricks SQL, meanwhile, is a serverless data warehouse that lets users run their SQL and analytics applications at high speed and scale.
AtScale’s availability on Partner Connect makes it easier for potential customers to discover AtScale and try a free version to see whether they want to deploy the platform. Taken together, the new features are significant because they all simplify the combination of AtScale and Databricks, according to Donald Farmer, founder and principal at TreeHive Strategy.
“Being discoverable and readily accessible in these tools simply lowers the barrier for integration between Databricks and AtScale,” he said. “And this does matter because integrating two sophisticated enterprise tools can be a daunting process. It’s not so much that new capabilities are unleashed — it’s rather that the process is now more manageable and efficient.” The partnership makes sense in both directions.
The AtScale semantic layer completes the picture by providing the right of kind of business-friendly data experience with a scale, performance and manageability that lives up to the promise of the data lakehouse. Farmer added that AtScale’s addition to Partner Connect is perhaps the most significant element of the expanded integration between AtScale and Databricks, given the exposure it will give AtScale among Databricks customers looking to expand their data and analytics capabilities.
Meanwhile, the vendors’ capabilities complement one another, making them good partners with the integrations between the two additive for joint customers, Farmer continued. He noted that lakehouses are attractive to organizations that use both structured and unstructured data to inform decisions. However, lakehouses don’t necessarily enable users to describe the business semantics of their data. “The partnership makes sense in both directions,” Farmer said.
