Databricks is an open, multi-cloud platform that combines the best of data lakes and data warehouses into a unified architecture. It provides unified data analytics platforms for your team including data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts. As George explained, “Instead of building a very complicated data pipeline to support some very optimized data model, you can just build a data pipeline that’s very easy to maintain and throw compute at it, and it’s going to cost far less than it would cost to pay the people to maintain a highly optimized system.” The profusion of available computational resources means that it is now practical to run computationally-heavy SQL-based transformations after the data have been warehoused. At the time, collecting, storing, and analyzing data at scale required significant investment and was viable only for enterprises that had budgeted a few hundred thousand dollars and a few months in human capital. Fast forward to the present and it is table stakes for an organization serious about building a data culture to invest in a data warehouse. It’s no surprise that this shift is being driven by the innovation taking place in the market that has led to better, more affordable data warehousing solutions.