Today, June 11, Databricks, a data and AI company, unveiled several innovations at the 20225 edition of the Data + AI Summit, the company’s event taking place in San Francisco (USA). The company announced a $100 million investment in global education in data and AI, aiming to eliminate the talent gap across the industry and prepare the next generation of engineers, analysts, and data scientists.
One of the initiatives included in this investment is the launch of the free edition of its Databricks platform, offering everyone—from students, amateurs, and future professionals in the field—free access to all the features of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Check out other highlights below:
Top news:
- Databricks Free Edition: This is a new offering that provides everyone—from students, amateurs, and future professionals in the field—free access to all the features of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and a comprehensive set of training resources to accelerate their knowledge of data and AI technologies. Read more here.
- Databricks One: a new experience to bring data and AI to every corner and offers corporate users simple and secure access to the data and AI resources provided by the Data Intelligence Platform. For the first time, corporate users will be able to interact with AI/BI dashboards, ask questions about data in natural language via AI/BI Genie, powered by deep research, quickly find relevant dashboards, and use customized Databricks apps—all in an elegant, no-code environment designed for their needs. Read more here.
- Agent Bricks: is a new automated way to create high-performance AI agents customized for your business. Simply provide a detailed description of the agent’s task and connect your company’s data—Agent Bricks handles the rest. The solution is optimized for common industry use cases, including structured information extraction, reliable knowledge assistance, customized text transformation, and orchestrated multi-agent systems. Read more here.
- Lakeflow Designer: This new no-code ETL feature allows non-technical users to create production data pipelines using a drag-and-drop visual interface and a natural language GenAI assistant. Lakeflow Designer is supported by Lakeflow, the unified solution for data engineers to build reliable data pipelines faster, leveraging all business-critical data, which is now available to everyone. Read more here.
- Lakebase: the first fully managed Postgres database built for AI, Databricks’ Lakebase adds an operational database layer to the company’s Data Intelligence Platform. Now, developers and businesses can build data applications and AI agents faster and easier on a single multi-cloud platform. Lakebase is now available in Public Preview. Read more here.
- Unity Catalog Updates: Unity Catalog adds full support for Apache Iceberg™ tables, including native support for Apache Iceberg REST Catalog APIs. Now, Unity Catalog is the only catalog that allows external engines to read and write, with fine-grained governance, Iceberg-managed and performance-optimized tables, eliminating dependencies and enabling seamless interoperability. Databricks is also introducing two new enhancements that extend Unity Catalog to corporate users.
- Donation of Declarative Pipelines to the Apache Spark™ open-source project : Databricks is open-sourcing its core declarative ETL framework, Apache Spark™ Declarative Pipelines. This initiative follows Apache Spark reaching two billion downloads and the recent release of Apache Spark 4.0. These releases build on Databricks’ long-standing commitment to open ecosystems, ensuring users have the flexibility and control they need without vendor lock-in. Spark Declarative Pipelines addresses one of the biggest challenges in data engineering, making it easier to build and operate reliable, scalable end-to-end data pipelines.
