BI applications are undoubtedly one of the major consumers of a data warehouse. Nevertheless, the prospect of accessing data using standard SQL is appealing to many more stakeholders than just the data analysts. We’ve heard from customers that they experience an increasing demand to provide access to data in their lakehouse platforms from external applications beyond BI, such as e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, SaaS applications, or custom data applications developed in-house. These applications require an “always on” experience, which makes Databricks SQL Serverless a great fit.

In this session, we give an overview of the approaches available to application developers to connect to Databricks SQL and create modern data applications tailored to needs of users across an entire organization. We discuss when to choose one of the Databricks native client libraries for languages such as Python, Go, or node.js and when to use the SQL Statement Execution API, the newest addition to the toolset. We also explain when ODBC and JDBC might not be the best for the task and when they are your best friends. Live demos are included.