Databricks is the lakehouse platform that unifies data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on a single platform — eliminating the need for separate data warehouse, data lake, and ML infrastructure. Delta Lake provides ACID transactions on data lakes. Apache Spark processes terabyte-scale data. Unity Catalog provides centralized governance. SQL Warehouse enables BI tool connectivity.
Enterprise Databricks requires: medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold layers), Unity Catalog governance (data access policies, lineage, audit), performance optimization (Photon engine, Z-ordering, liquid clustering), cost management (auto-scaling, spot instances, serverless SQL), and integration with Power BI, Tableau, and downstream applications.