Databricks combines data lakes and data warehouses into a "lakehouse." Your data stays in open formats (Parquet, Delta) on object storage. You get warehouse-like performance with lake flexibility.
Key components:
- Delta Lake: ACID transactions on data lakes
- Unity Catalog: Unified governance across all data assets
- SQL Warehouses: Serverless SQL endpoints
- Notebooks: Interactive development for data engineering and ML
Databricks works best when you need both analytics and ML on the same data.