Databricks partners with Tableau

Databricks has formed a partnership with Tableau Software, the leading visual analytics platform, to enable data teams to run business intelligence on data lakes faster and more reliably.

Friday, 4th October 2019 Posted 5 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Data lakes are frequently the largest source of data within organisations, but user analytics directly on the data lake often suffers from poor quality data and performance challenges. The new Databricks Connector, just released in version Tableau 2019.3, is optimised for performance and leverages integration with Delta Lake, an open source storage layer that makes existing data lakes reliable at scale. Through this integration, Tableau users can now access and analyse massive datasets across the entire data lake with the most up-to-date and real-time data.

“Our goal is to give data teams improved access to data no matter where it lives in the organisation. Creating a stronger, better performing integration with Tableau enables teams to now run analytics on the largest set of data which usually resides in the data lake,” said Michael Hoff, senior vice president of Business Development and Partners. “Organisations also want to leverage the latest data in the data lake and avoid analysts having to wait hours or days for it to be accessible. Data teams need real-time insights into their data and that’s what we’re bringing to Tableau users through our partnership.”

Every company needs to use data as a strategic differentiator to transform their business. To drive this data-driven transformation, organisations need to make all their data ready for analytics, empower data-driven decisions across the organisation, and rapidly adopt machine learning to leapfrog the competition. Databricks’ Unified Data Analytics Platform and Tableau Desktop and Server offers organisations a reliable and fast data lake where the data is directly consumable by Business Intelligence tools. Global organisations can now accelerate data-driven innovation across data science, data engineering, and business analytics.

“We’re thrilled to expand our partnership with Databricks and offer an optimised connection and enhanced performance that will enable customers to instantly leverage the power of Databricks directly within Tableau,” said Francois Ajenstat, Chief Product Officer at Tableau. “Tapping into data lakes and leveraging the power of Spark opens a new world of insights with Tableau, providing value from analysts to data scientists that has not been offered before.”

Customer feedback using the new Tableau connector shows 12x improvement in the initial connection speed to Databricks and 30 percent improvement in SQL generation time. The connector also makes it simple and easy to configure.

“Kabbage is leveraging Databricks to launch a best-in-class framework that democratizes data access across the company,” said David McGowan, CTO of Kabbage. "Databricks has reduced the time to set-up analytics and risk-modelling projects to nearly zero and simplified real-time data visualisation in Tableau to drive business decisions. Our data-rich environment changes rapidly and Databricks allows us to quickly adapt our architecture to optimise insights quickly across business units.”