Databricks Reviews

I've worked with Databricks primarily in the pharmaceuticals and life sciences space, which means a lot of work on patient-level data and the predictive analytics around that.

Another use case for Databricks is in the manufacturing industry. I'm a consultant, so the use cases for the product vary, but my primary use case for it is in the pharma space.

From a data science and applied analytics perspective, what I like about Databricks is that it's probably one of the most popular platforms that give access to folks who are trying not just to do exploratory work on the data but also go ahead and build advanced modeling and machine learning on top of that, and then go ahead and make that available for dissemination of insights. For example, you can save all data and build out endpoints, so business analysts and users can access that data through a dashboard.

During the process, I also like that Databricks allows you to do portion control to keep track of your operations on the data and maintain that lineage to create reproducible results. 

The most significant Databricks advantage is that you can do everything within the platform. You don't need to exit the platform because it's a one-stop shop that can help you do all processes.

The solution is top-notch from a data science, applied ML, or advanced analytics perspective.

I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement. Still, I am generally unaware of any super-critical issues.

My experience with Databricks is two and a half years.

Databricks stability is an eight out of ten because I never had issues with its stability.

Databricks has high scalability. Most of my work on the solution has been in the pharma space, which has massive data sets, so it's a nine out of ten, scalability-wise.

I've never dealt with the Databricks technical support team.

I don't have experience setting up Databricks because that's generally taken care of by the IT, data, or software engineering team before the data science team comes in and starts leveraging the platform. I have yet to experience setting up the Databricks environment personally. However, I have had experience setting up clusters, which was pretty straightforward. Still, in the overall environment of an enterprise-wide system, I have yet to gain experience setting Databricks up.

The cost for Databricks depends on the use case. I work on it as a consultant, so I'm using the client's Databricks, so it depends on how big the client is. If it's a global organization, that cost varies versus a smaller organization that has just adopted the platform and is trying to onboard a small team of five people. It depends.

I'm a data scientist, so I frequently use Databricks and Domino Data Science Platform.

I'm a consultant, so every client has a different version or a different runtime in Databricks, so the versions used would vary per client.

The deployment for the solution is on the cloud, predominantly on AWS or Azure.

My clients adopted Databricks as the platform of choice, and with different use cases and more teams coming on board, the usage of Databricks will increase. I don't see that going down. It can only go up.

My advice to anyone looking into implementing Databricks is that it should be one of your top choices, especially if you're looking to focus on data processing, standard ETL operations, advanced analytics, or the ML type of work.

I'd rate the solution as nine out of ten. It checks almost all the boxes that modern applications need to have.

My organization is an active partner and implementer of Databricks, but it doesn't resell the solution.

We use it for data analysis and testing of high volume web user behavioral data.

Databricks makes it really easy to use a number of technologies to do data analysis. In terms of languages, we can use Scala, Python, and SQL. Databricks enables you to run very large queries, at a massive scale, within really good timeframes.

I'm starting to build a solution using Delta Live Tables and Delta Live pipelines, and it is proving to be exceptionally easy to use. I have also been able to quickly implement a pipeline.

Databricks has added some alerts and query functionality into their SQL persona, but the whole SQL persona, which is like a role, needs a lot of development. The alerts are not very flexible, and the query interface itself is not as polished as the notebook interface that is used through the data science and machine learning persona. It is clunky at present.

I've been using Databricks for a year.

It is a stable and reliable solution. I'd rate stability at eight out of ten.

Databricks is absolutely scalable, and I'd rate scalability at eight out of ten. We probably have between 60 and 100 users in our organization, and we hope to increase usage in the future.

The technical support staff we have worked with have been amazing. They helped us initially with our Delta Live pipelines. I would give them a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

I have previously worked with Apache Hadoop, and Databricks is definitely a better product. It's much easier to get data quickly in Databricks. As a result, a lot of the drudgery is taken away. Whereas with Hadoop, it's a bit more tricky to get data together.

We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is.

I'd strongly recommend giving Databricks a try. We have found it to be a fantastic tool that has accelerated some of our solutions. We're an AI-heavy shop, and there are a lot of data scientists using the MLflow capabilities. I hear a lot of good things from that side as well. From a data analysis point of view, Databricks has been fantastic, and I would rate it at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use this solution for advanced civilization power.

We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time.

This product allows us to write the email models in a way that allows us to take the advantage of the parallel scaling computer window backend on any of the satellite services.

This solution only supports queries in SQL and Python, which is a bit limiting. 

This is a fairly expensive solution for any service outside of the basic package, and costs can add up quite quickly if there are large scaling requirements.

This is a stable solution in our experience.

We have found that part of the beauty of this platform is that it is easy to scale and expand.

The support for this product uses Microsoft as a middle man, and due to this there have been times when we experienced communication delays, as well as misunderstandings of what our issues are.

Neutral

The initial setup for this solution is very simple.

The basic version of this solution is now open-source, so there are no license costs involved. However, there is a charge for any advanced functionality and this can be quite expensive.

We looked at both Snowflake and BigQuery as a comparison with this solution. We choose this product as it offered more scalability and a higher level of security, which is extremely important in our banking environment.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use Databricks for customer marketing analytics.

Databricks lets you schedule jobs pretty easily, and you can use SQL, Spark SQL, Python, or R. It also allows you to save a table or view. 

I like that you can connect to multiple data sources. Most of our data is stored in the Azure data lake, but my previous company connected to SQL databases or even blob storage. 

They've improved on many features. I don't do data engineering, but I had an issue a couple of years ago at my two companies ago. It took a long time to read and save tables, but I think the new Delta feature helped. 

I like how easy it is to share your notebook with others. You can give people permission to read or edit. I think that's a great feature. You can also pull in code from GitHub pretty easily. I didn't use it that often, but I think that's a cool feature.

I would like it if Databricks adopted an interface more like R Studio. When I create a data frame or a table, R Studio provides a preview of the data. In R Studio, I can see that it created a table with so many columns or rows. Then I can click on it and open a preview of that data. 

Because I work in analytics and not data engineering, I think that's probably the biggest one. There are better graphical tools, so I don't think Databricks can compete. You can do a simple graph, and it's not that great. However, I don't think they can ever stack up to Tableau, so it's probably not worth it to improve upon that. 

I've been using Databricks for two years.

Databricks is stable.

Databricks is scalable.

Databricks tech support has been great every time I've dealt with them. Their team is highly knowledgeable. 

Setting up Databricks is easy. I set it up at my previous company. That was on Azure as well, but they utilized a third-party team with expertise in Databricks to ensure everything was optimized. 

I rate Databricks 10 out of 10. I recommend taking advantage of Databricks support or a third-party provider to ensure it's set up optimally. I don't know if it's an additional service you must pay for, but we always had access to Databricks support in my last company. 

I think that's worth the money because there are so many different scenarios with distributed computing. Even people who study analytics may not understand the ins and out of Spark. It's worth it to have a service contract for support.

We use the solution for data analytics of industrial data.

We extensively use the product’s notebooks, jobs, and triggers. We can create activities. Wherever translation is required, we use Databricks. The product fulfills our customer requirements. It is a cost-effective solution.

The product should provide more advanced features in future releases.

I have been using the solution for six months.

Our data was not too huge. It worked well. It is easily adaptable.

The tool is scalable. We can make it available for a larger audience.

The initial setup is not that difficult. I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten. The solution is cloud-based. We use native services like Data Factory for orchestration. Sometimes, the customers require us to use Amazon as the cloud provider instead of Azure.

The pricing is average.

There are many services which are coming up. They are still in the preview stage. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

I use Databricks to explore new features and provide the industry visibility and scalability of Databricks to the companies that I work with.

I create proof of concepts for companies. As a consultant, I also create training courses on Databricks. If a company wants to leverage a service provided by Databricks and needs to train people, they use our courses.

Databricks has a scalable Spark cluster creation process. The creators of Databricks are also the creators of Spark, and they are the industry leaders in terms of performance.

Databricks has made great strides in terms of performance. 

It is very user friendly. I like the ease of creating a Spark cluster, submitting a job, or creating a notebook.

The UI has also changed for the better compared to what it was two years ago.

If I want to create a Databricks account, I need to have a prior cloud account such as an AWS account or an Azure account. Only then can I create a Databricks account on the cloud. However, if they can make it so that I can still try Databricks even if I don't have a cloud account on AWS and Azure, it would be great. That is, it would be nice if it were possible to create a pseudo account and be provided with a free trial. It is very essential to creating a workforce on Databricks. For example, students or corporate staff can then explore and learn Databricks.

It's a big ask to have people jump through a lot of hoops to get approval to create a Databricks cluster just to explore it, but if they can try it on their own with a free trial without an underlying cloud account it would be more convenient.

Documentation can be improved as well. There are so many versions of documents. For example, when I tried to create a DBU vault and secrets file, I had to go through multiple versions of documents. This could be improved so that the documentation is easy to use.

I've been using this solution for about two years.

Stability wise, it's quite okay. In my experience, it doesn't crash.

I have not used autoscaling because it consumes a lot of money and because my experience has been alright. In some cases, though, it is tied to the quota of the underlying infrastructure. I have not tested the scalability to its fullest extent, but with the workloads I run, it has been fine.

When I wanted to create an AWS account and contacted technical support via email, I never received a response. Recently, however, I think they have improved their support a little bit, and I did get a call in response to my question. Overall, I've not faced any issues with the person I had to contact directly.

The initial setup is not very easy, but it's medium in complexity.

Databricks is a very expensive solution. Pricing is an area that could definitely be improved. They could provide a lower end compute and probably reduce the price.

I would rate Databricks at seven on a scale from one to ten. If you compare it to Snowflake, for example, Snowflake doesn't mandate an underlying cloud account. It creates one on its own. That's a subtle convenience that Snowflake has and one that Databricks could also build.

Snowflake's documentation is easy to use in comparison to that of Databricks. 

Our primary use case for this solution is research for data scientists. The solution is deployed on cloud.

It has allowed our data engineers, data scientists, and analysts to collaborate and work on the same platform. 

We have the ability to scale, collaborate and do machine learning.

The product cannot be integrated with a popular coding IDE.

We have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. There are five people using it in our organization.

I rate my experience with customer service and support an eight out of ten.

We previously used H2O.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Implementation was done in-house.

We have seen a return on investments.

Licensing costs are charged on a yearly basis and costs between 25,000 and 30,000.

We evaluated other options but this solution was the best fit for what we required.

I rate this solution nine out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by integrating with a popular coding IDE.

We use Databricks to define tool data and have many use cases to analyze and distribute the data.

Data is open to everyone; they can access it through many channels, including notebooks or SQL. That on its own democratizes the data.

I like cloud scalability and data access for any type of user.

It would be better if it were faster. It can be slow, and it can be super fast for big data. But for small data, sometimes there is a sub-second response, which can be considered slow.

In the next release, I would like to have automatic creation of APIs because they don't have it at the moment, and I spend a lot of time building them.

I have been using Databricks for roughly one and a half years.

Stability is excellent.

Databricks is scalable. You can use the power of the cloud to scale your cluster size, either CPU or memory. The data doesn't work like a standard database, so you don't have it based on files, and you don't copy the data. It's super scalable. It's only the computing that you have to scale with the data.

We probably have 40 users with roles like developers, business analysts, and data scientists. We have big plans to increase the usage and have more departments using it.

Technical support has helped us.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give technical support a five.

Positive

We used Cloudera before switching to Databricks.

The initial setup was fairly okay. It takes about two minutes to deploy this solution. It's all code, so we click a button, and then it's done.

On a scale from one to five, I would give the initial setup a four.

We set up and deployed this solution.

On a scale from one to five, I would give our ROI a three.

We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution. If you want to compute, you have to have a database layer and Azure below.

On a scale from one to five, I would give their pricing a two.

We looked at other options such as Snowflake and Cloudera on the cloud,

I would tell potential users that they need proper cloud engineers and a 
cloud infrastructure team to use this solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Databricks a nine.