Databricks Reviews

I like the ability to use workspaces with other colleagues because you can work together even without seeing the other team's job. So you can create a robust solution by working together with other professionals.

One area for improvement would be that anyone who doesn't know SQL may find the product difficult to work with. It would also be useful to have a remote support team inside Databricks, which would collect and analyze user feedback.

I have been using Databricks since 2018.

I had a little trouble with customer support but this was solved.

The initial setup was a little complex because it was a new architecture for the customer, so there was nothing to compare it to in order to accelerate the project. This meant the deployment of the first project using Databricks took almost nine months and the second took almost a year.

Databricks can be used for large-scale data pre-processing and data transformations.

The solution is easy to use and has a quick start-up time due to being on the cloud.

The solution could improve by providing better automation capabilities. For example, working together with more of a DevOps approach, such as continuous integration. There is a lot of code from places, such as GitHub, but it is not tailored for Databricks. It requires a lot of effort to bring the code to a level where it can be used with Databricks capabilities.

I have been using Databricks for two months.

The solution is stable.

Databricks is scalable.

We did not have a need to use technical support.

The installation is straightforward, and it took approximately one hour.

We did the implementation and maintenance of the solution ourselves using approximately three engineers.

The solution requires a subscription.

We are evaluating other solutions.

I would recommend this solution for those wanting to process large data sets, but if it is to be used for smaller data sets, I would not recommend it.

I rate Databricks a five out of ten.

We are working with Databricks and SMLS in the financial sector for big data and analytics. There are a number of business cases for analysis related to debt there. Several clients are working with it, analyzing data collected over a period of time and planning the next steps in multiple business divisions.

My organization is a professional consulting service. We provide services for the other organizations, which implement and use them in a production environment. We manage, implement, and upgrade those services, but we don't use them.

Databricks helps crunch petabytes of data in a very short period of time for data scientists or business analysts. It helps with fraud analysis, finance, projections, etc. I like it.

This is exactly the purpose of big data and analytics. It provides the mechanism to process and analyze a stream of information. It's best for share analysis and stream analysis.

Costs can quickly add up if you don't plan for it. 

I've been using Databricks for just over a year.

Databricks is stable. It also helps that their support is included as part of the service.

Databricks is scalable. The only issue is how much money you have for it. For example, if you need to run 100 servers, there's an eight-course with 256 gigabytes of RAM. You run out of money easily. It's charged to your credit card or your account, and you'll have to pay for it if you don't plan for that in advance.

Databricks technical support is excellent. They provided their responses on time, and they're useful. However, I don't have extensive experience with them.

I have used different Microsoft solutions before.

The initial setup depends on the readiness of the team working with Databricks. There is no one template saying that it's easy, and it isn't easy. It can be complex to set up if you don't have a really good plan.

You can get in this environment at least for a test. You can do it in the lab, follow it step by step, and that'll take about an hour. The difficulty depends on the business requirements. 

If it's for training purposes, you can do it in about half an hour, and you're good to go. If you need it to support a business, it will be much more rigorous because multiple divisions would be interested in running their own environment, working with their data.

The price is okay. It's competitive. 

If you're thinking of implementing Databricks, I would recommend working with professionals. It'll help you save time. Also, plan the work and work the plan. Otherwise, it'll be a waste of time and money.

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

We are a consulting house and we employ solutions based on our customers' needs. We don't generally use products internally.

I am a certified data engineer from Microsoft and have worked on the Azure platform, which is why I have experience with Databricks. Now that Microsoft has launched Synapse, I think that there will be more use cases.

You can spin up an Azure Databricks clustered, and integrating with it is seamless.

The integration with Python and the notebooks really helps.

There is definitely room for improvement.

This is the type of solution where you need to have people with technical expertise to use it.  Other products are self-service and can be employed by end-users. Databricks is not geared towards the end-user, but rather it is for data engineers or data scientists. I'm not sure whether Databricks is working towards it, or not.

It would be nice if it were more user-friendly, where you don't have to rely on Power BI or a visualization tool. I know that there is integration in the notebook where you can do it, but still, the relationships and semantics make it more difficult. It would be better to do it right in Databricks. You could put them within the portal and I don't have to log out and bring that into Power BI and then visualize.

We have not done any major implementation yet, although I think it's stable to an extent. I can't comment on it in terms of benchmark and experiencing any issues. It works seamlessly in the places where I've used it.

Our implementations have been small and we haven't needed to scale as of yet. 

Databricks can help you to build a data lake, and it's something that they need to help make more popular. People are slowly understanding it because if you look, there are lots of data lakes that people are trying to create. I'm not intimate with it, but the concept seems complicated. I think they need to write up something where videos can explain it better. What I have seen on YouTube is quite complicated for an end-user to understand.

The initial setup is easy. It's not difficult when you are used to Azure.

I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself. 

The cost is difficult to estimate. I've got customers who went to the cloud and then they realized that the costs were more, compared to what they used to be on-premises. Also, because our exchange rate is so weak, I would always advocate that prices being lower is better, although I don't know how feasible it is.

From a purely technical perspective, I would rate Databricks and eight out of ten. However, there is a failure in terms of user adoption. After I look at other products, including Synapse, those are better. I still feel that Databricks is quite complicated for the average person.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

Currently, I am using this solution for a forecasting project.

One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often. You can just spin it off and use that for a lot of your pre-processing, which is very convenient. 

The normal features are very good in terms of doing some quick development or doing some EDA.

Also, one of the newest features brought into this solution provides you with a way to solve, deploy, and train models using the platform itself. Or, it can connect to your Azure Machine Learning in order to train, deploy, and productionalize some of the machine learning models.

Since the Databricks community is not that old, there is not a lot of information about some of the issues that we face. We have to go back to the Databricks stream to get some of the issue resolutions from there. 

As time passes, and more people start putting more information out there about this technology, wit will be helpful.

I think even with the features that we currently have, they're still optimizing some of the clusters and trying to parallelize to better read from other types of data. So, that's going really well in terms of one of the features that they recently came up with to include the data format for data, which was really good, and that speeds up a lot of the processes.

I would like to see more documentation in terms of how an end-user could use it, and users like me can easily try it and implement use cases.

I have been using Databricks on a daily basis for over a year.

It's deployed on the cloud, so it's always up to date.

It's definitely quite stable, in terms of an enterprise solution. 

I'd say that it's pretty stable. 

You have these clusters running on-demand, and you can also come up with these clusters that are scheduled, and that can be run for your production jobs.

The pricing depends on the usage itself. They measure the cost of the companies in town. It also depends on the type of cluster that you are using. If you are using a very heavy cluster, it would be the price per CPU.

I would rate Databricks an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is to decrease costs and prevent any security press on data. I'm an IT manager and we are customers of Databricks. 

I think what I value is more about the technology itself because you don't need to have too much knowledge to be able to use the solution. 

I think we are using a lot of people to manage this solution. I'd like to see the people using this solution sharing their knowledge. 

We've been using this solution for around two years. 

The stability is okay now although a month after the data load there was a limitation for the first time on the project. That sorted itself out. 

It's a scalable solution. 

We have a good connection with technical support. 

I think the point is that because we'll be working collaboratively in the future, internally and externally, we should compare experiences and exchange knowledge. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We specialize in project consulting for our clients. Whenever we get the opportunity, we recommend Databricks to them.

The fast data loading process and data storage capabilities are great.

Based on the data loads and the performance, you can easily scale up the clusters.

Sometimes we experience issues connecting our database to Databricks. There are no direct connectors — they are very limited. This should be addressed and corrected in the next release.  

Reading past data can also be tricky as there is no data spectrum like you would find with Snowflake and other solutions. 

We have been using Databricks for one and a half years.

Both the scalability and the stability of Databricks is good.

Technical support is good but I have not interacted with them directly. We have a point of contact. We used to interact with tech support on a regular basis and they would respond quickly. We would get a response on the same day based on the priority level. Keep in mind, my company is in a partnership with them which could be a factor in their quick response time.

The initial setup was not very complex. We had it up and running in no time; it's a quick process.

We have just one solution architect and one data architect who handle all maintenance-related issues. 

I would recommend purchasing a package that includes technical support. Compared to other companies, they offer great support to their clients.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Databricks a rating of eight.

Our primary use case of Databricks is for advanced analytics. I'm the chief research officer of the company and we're customers of Databricks.  

I think the features I like the most are the scalability of the solution as well as its ability to share. We work with multiple people on notebooks and it enables us to work collaboratively in an easy way without having to worry about the infrastructure. I think the solution is very intuitive, very easy to use. And that's what you pay for.

I'd like to see more licensing options for the solution, the availability of additional pricing tiers. I understand it's not easy to achieve because it's a kind of platform-as-a-service type of solution. If you wanted to be more specific about the parts, and what you might or might not need, then you could save some money, and go for a lower level. Of course, that would then mean you'd have to manage more configurations which, as a user, would make things more complex but it would be good to have that option. The pricing is not the cheapest but it's understandable because it's a very high-end solution and easy to use, there's a lot of complexity masked away.

I would like to see additional monitoring tools and, in general, anything that can improve visualization of data. I know it's not the main point of Databricks and there are other tools that can be used, but anything that facilitates the integration of Databricks with visualization tools could be really useful. Increasing data scalability would also be great. 

I've been using this solution for a year. 

The solution has been very stable. 

Scalability of the solution seems very easy to achieve. 

We haven't had contact with technical support. 

The initial set was very straightforward because it's also in our Azure cloud so it was quite easy to set up and configure. Very intuitive.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.