Illustrating the Role of SAP Databricks in SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP Databricks provides advanced data engineering capabilities, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to SAP Business Data Cloud.

SAP Databricks is used by the data scientist who needs a powerful set of tools to develop algorithms and models on SAP data.

Databricks is a market leader in AI and machine learning and is already part of the IT landscape of many SAP customers. SAP and Databricks formed a partnership to provide SAP customers with seamless access to advanced tooling for data engineering projects within SAP Business Data Cloud.

To enable advanced AI/ML scenarios within SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP has fully embedded Databricks to provide seamless access to the data engineering tools. The name of the embedded version of Databricks is SAP Databricks.

Capabilities of SAP Databricks include:

• Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

  Support for full machine learning (ML) lifecycle, from experimentation to production, including generative AI and large language models.

• Data Science

  A collaborative and unified Data Science environment based on serverless computing, with integrated development environment (IDE) integration, and built-in visualization tools.

• Data Engineering

  Data ingestion and transformation: automated Extract Transform Load (ETL) processing, observability, and monitoring in a single stack.

• Data Governance

  Governance of structured and unstructured data, machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards, and files through SAP Databricks Unity Catalog.

By deploying SAP Business Data Cloud Intelligent Applications, you can obtain many immediate insights into your SAP data. But maybe you want to go deeper and develop and execute machine learning algorithms on top of that data. Or maybe you want to develop a generative data model on your SAP data to support AI cases.

SAP Databricks uses the industry-standard Delta Share protocol. Using Delta Share, you can directly go into your SAP Business Data Cloud cockpit and share any data product with SAP Databricks without the need to copy data.

An area of SAP-managed storage is provisioned with SAP Databricks to store the generated results. In addition, SAP Databricks requires its own working storage used for intermediate results during computation. Both of these data storage areas are managed and protected by SAP Business Data Cloud encryption mechanisms.

SAP Databricks is a tightly integrated component within SAP BDC and enables seamless sharing of Data Products for AI/ML use cases with SAP Databricks and for building/operationalizing the machine learning models.

Output from AI/ML models from SAP Databricks can also be shared using Delta Share for more modeling or reporting with the SAP Datasphere tenant of SAP Business Data Cloud. For example, to present the results generated using SAP Databricks using a story in SAP Analytics Cloud.