Feature Engineering at Scale

In this course, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to design, scale, and operationalize end-to-end feature engineering pipelines on the Databricks platform. The curriculum is structured across three progressive modules: mastering the fundamentals of Spark’s distributed execution and optimization, implementing scalable data ingestion with Auto Loader and declarative Lakeflow pipelines, and advancing to production-grade MLOps with the Databricks Feature Store.

You will engage in hands-on learning experiences such as debugging Spark performance with the Catalyst Optimizer and Spark UI, building robust Bronze-Silver-Gold medallion architectures with automated quality checks, and implementing scalable feature transformations using SparkML. The course culminates in deploying real-time feature serving through Online Feature Stores, defining FeatureSpecs with on-demand transformations, and applying governance and lineage tracking with Unity Catalog.

Skill Level

Professional

Duration

Prerequisites

The content was developed for participants with these skills/knowledge/abilities:

1. Completed the “Introduction to Apache Spark” course or possess equivalent foundational knowledge of Spark, including basic data transformations and Spark SQL.

* Learners should be comfortable with Spark’s role in distributed data processing. This course will build on that foundation to explain how Spark enables scalable machine learning workflows.

2. Intermediate-level proficiency in Python programming, particularly for data manipulation using libraries such as `pandas`, `numpy`, or `scikit-learn`.

3. Intermediate understanding of traditional machine learning workflows, including model training, evaluation, and hyperparameter tuning.

4. Familiarity with the Databricks platform and workflows.

* Learners are strongly encouraged to complete the Databricks Machine Learning Associate course prior to this course. This course assumes knowledge of ML development using the Databricks environment.

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Custom-fit learning paths for data, analytics, and AI roles and career paths through on-demand videos

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Databricks has a delivery method for wherever you are on your learning journey

Self-Paced

Custom-fit learning paths for data, analytics, and AI roles and career paths through on-demand videos

Instructor-Led

Public and private courses taught by expert instructors across half-day to two-day courses

Blended Learning

Self-paced and weekly instructor-led sessions for every style of learner to optimize course completion and knowledge retention. Go to Subscriptions Catalog tab to purchase

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Skills@Scale

Comprehensive training offering for large scale customers that includes learning elements for every style of learning. Inquire with your account executive for details

Upcoming Public Classes

Get Started with Lakebase

This get started course introduces Databricks Lakebase, a fully managed PostgreSQL service built into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform that brings operational (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads closer together.

The course begins with a conceptual lecture that compares OLTP and OLAP systems, explaining their different performance characteristics, storage models, and typical use cases. You will also explore the challenges organizations face when maintaining separate transactional databases and analytical platforms, including data movement, latency, and architectural complexity.

You will then learn how Databricks Lakebase helps address these challenges by providing a PostgreSQL-compatible operational database that integrates directly with the Databricks Lakehouse, enabling operational applications and analytics to work together within a unified platform.

Through hands-on labs, you will:

Create and explore a Lakebase project using autoscaling compute

• Navigate the Lakebase UI, including branching, monitoring, and configuration settings

• Create and query tables using the Lakebase SQL Editor

• Query Lakebase data from Databricks using Lakehouse Federation and foreign catalogs

• Perform Reverse ETL by synchronizing Delta tables to Lakebase

• Connect to Lakebase from Python and perform basic CRUD operations

This is a Get Started course, so the focus is on understanding the core concepts and basic workflows for working with Lakebase. Building full production applications on top of Lakebase is outside the scope of this course.

Note: For SCORM lecture files, please ensure that you close the SCORM window after completing the content. Do not click the ‘Next Lesson’ button, as doing so may prevent the SCORM module from being marked as complete.

Paid & Subscription

Lab

Onboarding

Data Warehousing Practitioner

Building Semantic Models in Databricks with UC Metric Views

In this course, you’ll learn how to empower your data consumers to get validated business insights with less burden on you and the rest of your enterprise's data and AI team. Through building a semantic layer on top of your gold layer, you'll offer decision makers and business analysts the opportunity to explore key business performance indicators in novel ways, while still maintaining efficient data operations and enterprise-vetted metrics.

Paid & Subscription

Lab

Associate

Agent Evaluation on Databricks

This course teaches students how to systematically evaluate AI agents using MLflow's evaluation framework, addressing the unique challenges of non-deterministic AI systems that traditional software testing cannot handle. Students learn to implement various evaluation approaches including built-in judges for common criteria like correctness and safety, guideline judges for business-specific requirements, and custom judges for specialized needs. The course covers both offline evaluation using curated datasets and online production monitoring, with hands-on experience using MLflow's tracing capabilities to understand agent execution patterns and collect human feedback from different stakeholder types. Through practical demonstrations and labs, students develop skills in creating evaluation workflows that drive continuous quality improvements throughout the AI agent development lifecycle.

Paid & Subscription

Lab

Associate