Trace Id is missing
Skip to main content

Azure Databricks

Enable data, analytics, and AI use cases on an open data lake.

Maximize the value of your data assets for all analytics and AI use cases

Azure Databricks is a fully managed first-party service that enables an open data lakehouse in Azure. With a lakehouse built on top of an open data lake, quickly light up a variety of analytical workloads while allowing for common governance across your entire data estate. Enable key use cases including data science, data engineering, machine learning, AI, and SQL-based analytics.

Azure first-party service tightly integrated with related Azure services and support.

Analytics for your most complete and recent data to provide clear actionable insights.

Data lakehouse foundation built on an open data lake for unified and governed data.

Reliable data engineering and large-scale data processing for batch and streaming workloads.

Get a unified experience

Azure Databricks is a fully managed Azure first-party service, sold and supported directly by Microsoft. It’s simple to get started with a single click in the Azure portal, and Azure Databricks is natively integrated with related Azure services. This means that there is no integration effort involved, and a full range of analytics and AI use cases can be rapidly enabled.

Unify your workloads to eliminate data silos and responsibly democratize data to allow scientists, data engineers, and data analysts to collaborate on well-governed datasets.

Analytics services in Azure with a pop up of a description of Azure Databricks
Video container

Harness an open and flexible framework

Use an optimized lakehouse architecture on open data lake to enable the processing of all data types and rapidly light up all your analytics and AI workloads in Azure.

Depending on the workload, use a variety of endpoints like Apache Spark on Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI.

Get flexibility to choose the languages and tools that work best for you, including Python, Scala, R, Java, and SQL, as well as data science frameworks and libraries including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and SciKit Learn.

Build efficient analytics in Azure

Set up Apache Spark clusters in minutes from within the familiar Azure portal.

Get lightning-fast query performance with Photon, simplicity of management with serverless compute, and reliable pipelines for delivering high-quality data with Delta Live Tables.

Azure Databricks offers predictable pricing with cost optimization options like reserved capacity to lower virtual machine (VM) costs. Basic Azure support directly from Microsoft is included in the price.

A performance comparison showing Photon being 20x lower than Spark 2.4, and significantly lower than Presto 230 and Spark 3.0. In this diagram, lower indicates better.

Comprehensive security and compliance, built in

Get started with an Azure free account

1

Start free. Get $200 credit to use within 30 days. While you have your credit, get free amounts of many of our most popular services, plus free amounts of 55+ other services that are always free.

2

After your credit, move to pay as you go to keep building with the same free services. Pay only if you use more than your free monthly amounts.

3

After 12 months, you'll keep getting 55+ always-free services—and still pay only for what you use beyond your free monthly amounts.

Related Azure services

 

Azure Synapse Analytics

Limitless analytics service with data warehousing, data integration, and big data analytics in Azure.

Azure Data Factory

Hybrid data integration service that simplifies ETL at scale.

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2

Massively scalable, secure data lake functionality built on Azure Blob Storage.

Azure Machine Learning

Enterprise-grade machine learning service to build and deploy models faster.

Power BI Embedded

Analytics and interactive reporting added to your applications.

Azure Data Lake

A no-limits data lake to power intelligent action.

Frequently asked questions about Azure Databricks

  • A Databricks unit, or DBU, is a normalized unit of processing capability per hour based on Azure VM type, and is billed on per-second usage. The DBU consumption depends on the size and type of instance running Azure Databricks.

  • With the serverless compute version of the Databricks platform architecture, the compute layer exists in the Azure subscription of Azure Databricks rather than your Azure subscription. Read more.

  • Photon is Apache Spark rewritten in C++ and provides a high-performance query engine that can accelerate your time to insights and reduce your total cost per workload.

  • Delta Lake is an optimized storage layer that provides the foundation for storing data and tables in Azure Databricks. Explore the resource what is a data lake to learn more about how it’s used.

  • You can save on your Azure Databricks unit (DBU) costs when you pre-purchase Azure Databricks commit units (DBCU) for one or three years. You can use the pre-purchased DBCUs at any time during the purchase term.

    The pre-purchase discount applies only to the DBU usage. Other charges such as compute, storage, and networking are charged separately.

    Read more.

  •  Microsoft Fabric is built on the same open Delta Parquet format storage that Azure Databricks also supports. This allows Azure Databricks to work with the open format OneLake in Microsoft Fabric. Read more.

Ready when you are—let's set up your Azure free account

Try Azure for free