Excel
The big news this week is the possibility of native importing Excel files. Write operations are also possible. There is a possibility of choosing a data range. It also works with the streaming autoloader, currently in beta.
GPT 5.2
The same day that OpenAI released Chat GPT 5.2, it was available in databricks. Check your system-ai schema in Unity Catalog and find it there (depending on the region).
Runtime 18
Runtime 18 brings performance improvements to stateless streaming queries (Adaptive Query Execution (AQE) and auto-optimized shuffle (AOS) are also available now for streaming). Improvements related to UDF performance (shared environments). Window functions are now available in the metrics view.
Read all the news on https://databrickster.medium.com/databricks-news-week-50-8-december-2025-to-14-december-2025-72f5e5f...
My blog: https://databrickster.medium.com/
