Data Visualization with Databricks Series — Article #1, Quickly Visualize and Understand Your Data
In today’s data-driven world, the ability to effectively interpret and communicate data is paramount. As businesses grapple with increasingly large and complex datasets, the demand for powerful and rapid data visualization tools has never been greater.
Among the array of options available, Databricks emerges as a cloud-native data platform with built-in support for charts and visualizations in both Databricks SQL and Notebooks. In this article we will explore the compelling data visualization capabilities of Databricks SQL.
Empowering Data Exploration
With Databricks SQL, exploring data becomes an intuitive and immersive experience. Through interactive charts, graphs, and dashboards, users can delve deep into the intricacies of their datasets, uncovering hidden patterns, trends, and anomalies. Real-time data processing ensures that insights remain up-to-date, enabling agile decision-making in dynamic environments.
Databricks SQL User Interface (UI)
To show how well the Databricks SQL UI serves as a central hub for users to interact with and analyze data, let’s start with an example that illustrates the output of a simple SQL query.
Please keep in mind that this data is purely a sample obtained from Databricks, derived from a fabricated customer dataset utilized solely for demonstration purposes, and does not correspond to any real-world connections.
- To the left, you’ll find a dedicated data explorer pane displaying all accessible catalogs, schemas, and tables.
- Positioned at the top is a dedicated area for writing SQL queries.
- Below, you’ll observe the outcomes of your query.
Interactive Visualizations
The plus icon is where the magic starts to happen!
By choosing Visualization, the built-in support for interactive visualizations pop-up window opens, allowing users to transform query results into compelling charts and graphs. And the best of it: all within Databricks.
With a few clicks, users can create dynamic visualizations to explore data trends, patterns, and relationships, enhancing their understanding of the underlying data.
In this example we have a Bar chart where the X column has been set as state and the Y column as star (meaning all records) with default count (number of records). We can already see a preview of the visualization appearing on the right side. And it’s incredibly fast!
To return, just save the visualization by hitting the save button.
Now we have two tabs above the visualization: “Results”, which displays the previous output from the SQL query; and “Customer Count by State”, showing our newly created bar chart.
The Bar chart is only one visualization type from more than 15 currently available in Databricks SQL. From basic charts like Line and Scatter plots to more advanced visualizations such as Heatmaps and Histograms, users have access to a comprehensive toolkit for exploring and interpreting data.
Additionally, Databricks supports interactive visualizations like Pivot tables and Maps, empowering users to interactively analyze and visualize their data following the most current data visualization trends in the industry.
Conclusion
In the era of big data, the ability to extract actionable insights from data is a competitive differentiator. Data visualization can boost data-driven business strategies by providing clear visual insights and facilitating informed decision-making. Databricks has not only an easy to connect Tableau and Power BI integration system, but also offers a powerful and managed client-side visualization tool. This makes queries run quickly allowing industries (Financial Services, Real Estate & Construction, Travel & Hospitality, Insurance, CPG, Sports & Gaming) to unlock the full potential of their data and stay ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly evolving landscape.
