Databricks Lakehouse Platform vs. Kortical

If you need a managed big data megastore, which has native integration with highly optimized Apache Spark Engine and native integration with MLflow, go for Databricks Lakehouse Platform. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform is a breeze to use and analytics capabilities are supported out of the box. You will find it a bit difficult to manage code in notebooks but you will get used to it soon.

Incentivized

Kortical is really widely applicable to many use cases, although it doesn't handle images or video it is great to help you build really great ML models without needing to plan ahead what you are going to try, you let the platform build you the best model. It is suited to beginner and more advanced data scientists as you can edit the code to narrow the search space which makes model creation more you build it without AutoML. Hosting the model behind an API that is ready to go is great as it saves so much time vs doing that dev work from scratch

• Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
• Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
• Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
• Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers

Incentivized

• The NLP models results were much better than the ones that we did outside of the platform.
• It is really easy and quick to build a good model with a lot of the manual boring tasks all done automatically like one hot encoding, etc.
• Kortical shows the features and their importance for any model type as part of the platform which is great for understanding the models.

• Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
• Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
• Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced

Incentivized

• It would be ideal to have Jupyter built into the platform, they say it is coming.
• Also while it is easy to use, at the start it would have been helpful to have more help guides.

Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX

Incentivized

One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.

Their support is great as we use Slack and we have our own channel and they always respond really quickly. Data Science support is available to help unblock you as well as dev support as we're setting up the data feeds. It would be great if there were more FAQ or self-help guides in the platform but the personal touch is also really appreciated and probably gets us there quicker anyway.

Compared to Synapse & Snowflake, Databricks provides a much better development experience, and deeper configuration capabilities. It works out-of-the-box but still allows you intricate customisation of the environment. I find Databricks very flexible and resilient at the same time while Synapse and Snowflake feel more limited in terms of configuration and connectivity to external tools.

• The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
• DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
• The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.

Incentivized

• ROI is great as what we would spend on compute we get the AutoML for essentially the same price so it is cost neutral as Kortical comes with compute built-in.
• The results mean that we can automate so much more than our previous model so that is key to the positive ROI.
• The platform auto trains new models and lets us know when there is a better model so it has saved a lot of time so we can focus on new business problems to solve with ML.