22-25 April 2026
SQLBits 2020

Databricks, Delta Lake and You

Databricks, Lakes & Parquet are a match made in heaven, but explode with extra power when using Delta Lake. This session will dive into the details of how Databricks Delta works and how to make the most of it.

Data Lakes & Parquet are a match made in heaven, but they’re cranked up to overdrive with the new features of Delta Lake. Available as the open source Delta Lake, or the premium Databricks Delta. This session will take a deeper look at why parquet is so good for analytics, but also highlight some of the problems that you’ll face when using immutable columnstore files.

We’ll then switch over to Databricks Delta, which takes parquet to the next level with a whole host of features – we’ll be looking at incremental merges, transactional consistency, temporal rollbacks, file optimisation and some deep and dirty performance tuning with partitioning and Z-ordering.

If you’re planning, currently building, or looking after a Data Lake with spark currently and want to get to the next level of performance and functionality, this session is for you. Never heard of parquet or delta? You’re about to learn a whole lot more!

Speakers

Simon Whiteley

advancinganalytics.co.uk/blog

Simon Whiteley's previous sessions

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Behind the Hype - Architecture Trends in Data
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Bringing Data Lakes to your Purview
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Ever spent an age releasing a data model, only to find no-one uses it? There's a better way of working, driven by both technology & agile working practices, let me tell you about Value Driven Development & DataOps
 
Databricks, Delta Lake and You
Databricks, Lakes & Parquet are a match made in heaven, but explode with extra power when using Delta Lake. This session will dive into the details of how Databricks Delta works and how to make the most of it.
 
The Azure Spark Showdown - Databricks VS Synapse Analytics
Azure now has two slick, platform-as-a-service spark offerings, but which one should you choose? A separate specialist tools or a one-size-fits-all solution? Join Simon as he compares and contrasts the spark offerings.
 
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Azure SQLDW - WHAT, WHERE, WHEN and HOW to use it.