What I like best about Azure Databricks is how it simplifies large-scale data processing while still giving flexibility to engineers. From my experience, the biggest advantage is the unified platform I can do data engineering, transformations, performance tuning, and even analytics in one place without jumping across multiple tools. The integration with Spark is seamless, and things like auto-scaling clusters, job scheduling, and notebook collaboration make day-to-day work much more efficient. I also appreciate features like Delta Lake handling ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel directly on data lakes makes production pipelines much more reliable. On top of that, optimizations like Adaptive Query Execution, auto-optimize, Z-ordering, and caching really help when working with large datasets. Another thing I like is how well it integrates with the Azure ecosystem whether it’s ADLS, ADF, Key Vault, or Unity Catalog for governance. It reduces a lot of setup overhead and makes deployments smoother across environments. Overall, it lets me focus more on solving data problems and performance tuning rather than worrying about infrastructure management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
One thing I dislike about Azure Databricks is that cost management can get tricky if clusters and jobs aren’t monitored closely. Because it’s so easy to spin up clusters and run large workloads, costs can increase quickly especially with auto-scaling or multiple parallel jobs running. So it requires good governance and monitoring in place. Another area is debugging and troubleshooting. While notebooks are great for development, debugging production job failures especially intermittent Spark or infrastructure issues can sometimes take time. Logs are available, but tracing the exact root cause across cluster events, Spark UI, and job runs isn’t always straightforward. I’ve also noticed that handling CI/CD and deployments (like moving notebooks, workflows, configs across environments) isn’t as smooth out of the box compared to traditional code repos. It’s improving with Databricks Asset Bundles and Repos, but still needs careful setup. That said, most of these are manageable with best practices cost controls, monitoring, and proper DevOps processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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