Databricks acquisition of Redash boosts data visualization
Databricks bought Redash, a data visualization vendor, to boost its own visualization capabilities. Databricks had largely relied on partnerships with other vendors for such tools.
Databricks acquired data visualization startup Redash to simplify dashboarding for the AI and analytics platform vendor's users.
For Databricks, the acquisition will give it data visualization capabilities that it had previously lacked, making Databricks' platform more complete for data scientists and analysts.
Positive move
"Databricks' acquisition of Redash is a smart move because Databricks had to largely rely on partners such as Qlik for data visualization," said Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri.
Speaking during the opening keynote of the Spark + AI Summit 2020 on Wednesday, Redash founder Arik Fraimovich noted that Redash has a variety of visualizations that users can group into dashboards. The platform supports 40 types of databases, data warehouses, data lakes and different types of APIs, enabling most users to connect to it.
Open source
Redash, an open source platform, will appeal to Databricks' user base of coders, Gualtieri said. Databricks integrates well with open source tools and has released a number of its own tools, including MLFlow and Delta Lake. The founders of Databricks originally created the open source framework Apache Spark, an integral part of Databricks.
The Databricks acquisition of Redash will boost its data visualization capabilities.
Redash, started in 2015, gives users a SQL interface to query databases in their natural syntaxes.
Databricks' acquisition of Redash is a smart move.
Mike GualtieriAnalyst, Forrester
"Databricks data visualization partners will still be important, but having Redash built in should reduce the complexity of Databricks sales cycles for customers that want data visualization but not the whole BI [platform]," Gualtieri said.
Databricks, which revealed the acquisition at the conference, did not comment on the price of the Redash acquisition. Both companies are private.
The conference is being held virtually this year from June 22 to June 26 due to COVID-19.
Also during the conference, Databricks introduced Delta Engine, a query engine built on Spark 3.0. Delta Engine accelerates the performance of Delta Lake, launched last year to help structure data in data lakes for SQL and DataFrame workloads.
