mark_ott
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee

Is Databricks PySpark a Fork?

  • Not a true fork: It’s not maintained independently from Apache Spark but is a close superset with proprietary improvements. Codebases largely track, but Databricks sometimes “forks” select modules or patches, then later merges when upstream releases catch up.

  • Result: Features may appear early, or behave differently, on Databricks than on the open source PySpark.