SAP Databricks: uniting data with AI for smarter insights

From data warehouses to SAP BDC and Databricks

If you’ve read our blog on why SAP BDC is a gamechanger, you already know that the BDC platform is SAP’s central data environment. It connects business data from across your SAP landscape and beyond, while keeping it clean and secure.

Still, structure and governance aren’t enough to get deep insights. You also need to explore data, understand it, and experiment with it. That’s where Databricks fits in.

What is SAP Databricks?

Databricks is a unified analytics and AI platform that bundles analytics, machine learning, data engineering and collaboration tools. This enables data engineers and analytics or AI teams to clean, transform, and explore vast amounts of structured and unstructured data using familiar tools such as SQL, Python, and R.

What sets Databricks apart is its ability to scale effortlessly, while ensuring reliability and speed. One major part of that secret is powered by Delta Lake. This is an open-source technology that brings ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and optimized data layout to your data lake. Combined with Databricks’ interactive notebooks, high-performance SQL engine and collaborative workspace, it enables business users to work efficiently with large-scale data in real time.

The mission of Databricks is to help organizations make sense of all their data, wherever it lives, and put AI to work faster. Exactly what SAP aims to do.

How does SAP Databricks work?

To bring the powerful features of Databricks into the SAP ecosystem, SAP joined forces with Databricks, the team behind the platform, to launch SAP Databricks. This dedicated, SAP-certified version is embedded right into SAP BDC, ready for you to activate.

As SAP Databricks seamlessly fits into your SAP landscape, your SAP data stays where it belongs: inside SAP’s secure environment. No exporting, no replication, no risk. You simply access your SAP data products as governed datasets in Databricks and start exploring, analysing, or training AI models. Moreover, working with SAP Databricks feels intuitive and safe. Here’s how it goes:

Setup: quick and effortless

Getting started takes minutes, not days. With just a few clicks, you can activate SAP Databricks straight from your SAP for Me portal and dive in – no separate setup or extra logins needed. Moreover, the platform’s compute power scales automatically with your workload, so instead of worrying about infrastructure, teams stay focused on insight and innovation.

Use: collaboration, insights and speed

Inside Databricks, business users, analysts, and data scientists share one collaborative workspace where they can explore data, visualize results, and build AI models without switching tools. The analytics experience is powerful: analysts can write and run SQL queries in a high-performance, serverless environment, or jump into shared notebooks to code, annotate, and model together with colleagues. Whatever you do and with whomever you work: collaboration feels effortless

AI-assisted tools like Databricks Assistant speedthings up and make experimentation accessible to anyone. For machine-learning teams, there’s MLflow for training, tracking, deploying, and monitoring models. With Mosaic AI, you can even fine-tune large language models with your own business data.

Governance: built in

With Unity Catalog, access management and compliance tracking happen behind the scenes. Manage access rights, trace data lineage, and keep full control over compliance, all from one place. Data stays traceable, responsibilities stay clear.

Working with SAP data in and out of Databricks

Because SAP Databricks is integrated with SAP BDC, everything connects natively. When a data product is activated in BDC, it’s instantly available in Databricks through a secure Delta Share connection – no extra ETL required. And once you’ve built insights or trained models, you can publish them straight back into SAP, enriched, documented, and ready to power dashboards or business applications.

In short: the loop between SAP and Databricks is seamless. Data goes in, value comes out – all within SAP’s trusted ecosystem.