Business Impact Accelerator

This 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.

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: Databricks Academy is transitioning to a notebook-based format for classroom sessions within the Databricks environment, discontinuing the use of slide decks for lectures.

This course teaches how to build production-ready ETL pipelines using pure SQL on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Students learn Streaming Tables with Auto Loader for incremental ingestion, Materialized Views with incremental refresh for Silver-to-Gold transformations, AUTO CDC (FLOW AUTO CDC) for declarative SCD Type 1 and Type 2 dimension management, and Lakeflow Jobs with SQL File tasks for production orchestration. The course follows a realistic retail dataset through the medallion architecture (Bronze → Silver → Gold).

Note: Databricks Academy is transitioning to a notebook-based format for classroom sessions within the Databricks environment, discontinuing the use of slide decks for lectures. You can access the lecture notebooks in the Vocareum lab environment.

This course teaches you how to design, build, and maintain a Databricks Genie Space, a natural language interface that enables business users to ask questions about governed data and receive SQL-backed answers without writing code.

You will learn how Genie fits into the Databricks AI/BI product family and how it translates natural language into reliable SQL queries. The course focuses on what it takes to create a Genie Space that delivers accurate, consistent, and trustworthy results.

You will follow a complete end-to-end workflow, from understanding source data and defining benchmarks to configuring and refining a Genie Space using the full set of Knowledge Store curation tools. These include metadata, synonyms, prompt matching, SQL logic, example queries, and text instructions.

You will also learn how to share Genie Spaces with business users through Databricks One, understand how Unity Catalog governance is automatically enforced, and use monitoring and user feedback to continuously improve quality over time.

By the end of the course, you will be able to create and manage a production-ready Genie Space that delivers governed, self-service conversational analytics at scale.

Note: Databricks Academy is transitioning to a notebook-based format for classroom sessions within the Databricks environment, discontinuing the use of slide decks for lectures. You can access the lecture notebooks in the Vocareum lab environment.