🌟 Community Pulse: Your Weekly Roundup! November 07 – 13, 2025

[Advika]

This week was charged – from insightful discussions to Hackathon brilliance, our members showed off their creativity, collaboration, and unmatched Databricks energy! 💪
Let’s dive into this week’s highlights 👇

👏 Community Stars of the Week

Big cheers to everyone who helped make this week shine ✨! Your answers, guidance, and fresh ideas keep this community alive 🙌:

@ManojkMohan  |  @szymon_dybczak  |  @bianca_unifeye  |  @Coffee77

+ Top Brickster contributors:

@mark_ott  | @Louis_Frolio  |  @KaushalVachhani  | @stbjelcevic 

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💻 Free Edition Hackathon Highlights

• Future of Movie Discovery: How I Built an AI Movie Recommendation Agent on Databricks Free Edition
• Building a Theoretical Solar Flare Intelligence System for the Databricks Free Edition Hackathon
• Hackathon Project: Recipe Recommendation Engine with Traditional ML + Genie on Databricks Free Edit

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🌎 Announcements & Events

• Big Book of Data Engineering - Get how-tos, code snippets and real-world examples
• Setup Spark with Hadoop Anywhere : A DBR aligned local Spark+HDFS+Hive stack on Docker
• Omaha Databricks User Group Meeting

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📎 Technical Blogs

• Replace-by-Key with Exploded Data in Databricks: Manual SCD with Explode
• A Data Practitioner's Guide - Managing Delta Table History, Data Retention and Data Recovery
• Operationalize Your Lakehouse: Lakebase for Low-Latency Apps & APIs
• How to Deploy Metric Views with DABs
• From Hackathon to Impact: Building a Data-Driven Forecasting App on Databricks
• How to Accelerate Databricks SQL Migration Using BrickMod and AI

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🖇 Community Articles

• My First Month Learning Databricks - Key Takeaways So Far.
• Optimizing Delta Table Writes for Massive Datasets in Databricks
• How to enforce dynamic data Masking and access control directly in Databricks Unity Catalog
• How Upgrading to Databricks Runtime 16.4 sped up our Python script by 10x
• Control Databricks Costs with AI & BI Dashboards - Video Summary

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💬 Hot Discussions

• Databricks Apps pricing
• AgentBricks - Multi Agent Supervisor Issue
• Does VACUUM on Delta Lake also clean Iceberg metadata when using Iceberg Uniform feature?
• What Are the Key Challenges in Developing ETL Pipelines Using Databricks?
• When working with large data sets in Databricks, what are best practices to avoid memory out-of-memo
• Measuring latency metrics like TTFT, TBT when deploying agents on Databricks

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🔍 Feedback Corner

• Why Agent Bricks Is a Game Changer
• Looking for Suggestions: Designed a Decision Tree to Recommend Optimal VM Types for Workloads
• Databricks Asset Bundles - High Level Diagrams Flow

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✅ Top Resolved Posts
    The community worked together to solve challenges and bring solutions this week:

• DATA_SOURCE_NOT_FOUND Error with MongoDB (Suggestions in other similar posts have not worked)
• DQX usage outside Databricks
• Where are GPT-5 and Gemini in Azure Databricks?
• Delta live table not showing in workspace (Azure databricks with premium plan..)
  
• MERGE operation not performing data skipping with liquid clustering on key columns

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Keep the energy high – if we missed tagging you this week, make sure next week’s spotlight shines on you 😁!
Stay tuned, and a BIG THANK YOU to everyone for making this Community a place of growth and collaboration👏😃.

[Coffee77]

Thanks for mentioning! Very appreciated 😉

[KaushalVachhani]

Thanks for the shoutout, @Advika. Appreciate it!

[Brahmareddy]

Thanks @Advika , and Databricks Community! 

Thank you so much for featuring my app FMD – Future of Movie Discovery!
I really appreciate the shout-out and the encouragement from the community.
FMD was built on Databricks Free Edition as a fun experiment to show how data + AI can make movie recommendations more personal and intelligent.
It means a lot to see it recognized — thank you for helping it reach more people!