What an excellent evening at the inaugural Databricks Bristol Meetup! It was great to finally have an Databricks community in Bristol.
A massive thanks to iO Associates for pulling this together and also to the awesome speakers.
The evening had two great presentations/
- What's New in Databricks: A quick segment to kick things off, following an introduction from Simon Whiteley, covering the latest updates and features from the Databricks platform.
- The Metadata Marathon: How three projects are racing forward: Holly Smith (Staff Developer Advocate, Databricks) dove deep into the three major open storage formats: Delta, Hudi, and Iceberg. The presentation covered the history, underlying tech, roadmaps, and the real-world impact of these technologies on the data landscape.
My key takeaways from the event were as follows:
- Open Storage Formats: Understanding the inner workings of Delta, Hudi, and Iceberg is complex and in most cases you don’t actually have to. With the exception of some edge cases format selection often boils down to your chosen tooling rather than fundamental differences in the functionality. It is however an excellent idea to to understand the landscape at a high level.
- Databricks AI Assistant: If you’ve written off Databricks AI Assitant as not working for you, you may want to look at configuring your workspace settings. Here you can set both user and workspace settings and give it much more context, and set things like coding standards.
Overall it was a great event, great to connect with customers and find out what everyone was up to. Also a great reminder of how valuable attending meetups can be.
If you’re interested in attending or speaking at the next event, you can find the details here: Databricks Bristol Meetup.
