Databricks

“At the end of the day, it's all about protecting our customers at the highest level that we possibly can — and making sure that we have the best efficacy in the industry.” Barracuda's Chief Product Officer Neal Bradbury shares how the company is training advanced models to combat phishing and network attacks — enabling fast, agentic AI responses, and ensuring secure governance. Barracuda is uniting product and customer data on Databricks to power BarracudaONE: an AI-driven cybersecurity platform that protects hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide.

The first Databricks Free Edition Hackathon highlighted what builders can create when ideas move quickly to working prototypes. Participants from 16 countries used Free Edition to build data and AI projects, with three entries standing out for their technical depth, creativity, and impact. Winning projects: - Turn unstructured technical videos into searchable insights: VidMind by Narender Kumar - Zoe B.’s space weather system for predicting power grid failures from solar events - Hasnat Abdul’s NLP-powered recipe recommendation engine Explore the projects and start building with Databricks Free Edition: https://lnkd.in/gmhRihhp

[DEMO] See how Lakebase acts as the transactional data layer for data and AI apps by bringing fully managed, serverless Postgres into the Databricks lakehouse. What you'll learn: - What Lakebase is and how it fits into the Databricks ecosystem - Why Lakebase uses Serverless Postgres and what that enables - How to use Lakebase for data apps, internal tools, and AI agents Databricks Senior Developer Advocate Andre Landgraf walks through the architecture and a live example: https://lnkd.in/gamF5rJR

Analytics teams want to spend more time answering questions and less time tuning systems or tracking down costs. Recent improvements have made Databricks SQL 5x faster on average, with performance delivered automatically and no index or parameter management required. Learn how Databricks SQL delivers faster analytics with no tuning. https://lnkd.in/gPWUnGvs

The Databricks Learning Festival is back! Complete a self-paced learning pathway in data engineering, analytics, machine learning, generative AI, Apache Spark™, data warehousing, and more. Finish all modules in at least one pathway to unlock: - 50% off a Databricks certification - 20% off an annual Academy Labs subscription Join us and invest in your data and AI skills - now through Jan 19: https://lnkd.in/giuFHuCR

We’re heading to retail’s biggest stage! Join us at #NRF2026 to see how retailers are putting AI agents to work across the enterprise with Databricks. Stop by booth #6429 to explore live demos and see how customers and partners are operationalizing AI in production.

2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI adoption. Here’s what Databricks leaders see coming next: - Greater flexibility in model choice, with teams selecting models based on performance and cost for specific workloads - Governance evolving into the control layer for AI agents, with visibility across data, models, and end-to-end decision flows - AI development consolidating where trusted, governed, multimodal data already lives, reducing complexity and speeding time to value - A people-first approach to AI that equips domain experts with specialized tools, helping them stay focused on high-value work https://lnkd.in/ggtJZafi

Together, Databricks + Palantir Technologies are accelerating high-impact AI use cases and outcomes. In this walkthrough, Benjamin Abood and Chad Wahlquist break down how the integration enables: - Secure, bidirectional data federation with minimal data movement - Unified governance using Unity Catalog - Compute pushdown so workloads run where the data lives - Tighter integration between analytics, workflows, and operational AI https://lnkd.in/g2tyksZW

Guild supports employers like Target, Chipotle, and JPMorgan Chase, but scaling its learning catalog made finding accurate program information slow and fragmented. Generic chatbots could not meet the bar for accuracy or governance. With Databricks Agent Bricks, Guild built Catalog Atlas, a governed AI agent that delivers trusted answers in seconds. The result is 80% faster queries, 450 hours saved annually, and $33K+ in measurable value, freeing teams to focus on higher-impact work: https://lnkd.in/gYFdkhpY

A year after open-sourcing Unity Catalog, open governance is proving its value. Hundreds of organizations now use UC Open APIs to connect any engine, govern Delta and Iceberg tables, and rely on credential vending for secure, temporary access. With upcoming external writes, expanded credential vending, and UC 0.4, interoperability at scale continues to grow. Discover how to start building with UC Open APIs: https://lnkd.in/dU-92aWX