Databricks Explained to a Power BI Guy | Daten-WG Podcast with Vitalija Bartusevičiūtė

Episode von Daten-WG von Daten-WG · 13. September 2026 · 33 min

Time to step out of the Microsoft comfort zone:

this episode is about Databricks.

Vitalija Bartusevičiūtė, Databricks MVP and Senior Consultant at Capgemini, explains what makes so many people in the data community fall in love with the platform, and why "customizable" is both its biggest strength and its biggest hurdle.

We talk about Genie and what it really takes to let business users talk to their data: clean data, metadata, synonyms, benchmarks and a clear question to answer. From there we drift into metric views, the Open Semantic Interchange, SQL dialects, DirectQuery vs. import mode, and why Excel is still both the source and the end of every data pipeline.

Vitalija Bartusevičiūtė https://www.linkedin.com/in/vitalijabart/

Artur König https://www.linkedin.com/in/datakoenigartur/

Daten-WG 2026 conference, October 14-16, Cologne: https://www.daten-wg.com/daten-wg-2026

00:00 – Intro: stepping out of the Microsoft comfort zone

01:02 – From biologist and R to Databricks MVP

02:18 – Why Databricks? Customization and the Unity Catalog moment

04:05 – Only for big enterprises? Databricks Free for everyone

05:39 – "I'm not married to a tool": solving the client's problem first

08:05 – What Databricks actually is: Spark, SQL and the growing AI part

09:06 – Genie: talking to your data in the Teams chat of a convenience store

12:55 – Metadata, synonyms and how end users really talk about data

14:13 – Benchmarks, joins and the 80% rule for a good Genie space

16:44 – Flat tables, Frankenstein tables and rethinking best practices for AI

17:15 – Metric views and the Open Semantic Interchange initiative

19:44 – Delta, SQL dialects and why semantic models are still black magic

25:55 – Governance, DirectQuery vs. import and the Excel loop

30:42 – Advice: try Databricks Free and focus on the problem, not the tool

31:30 – Python pre-con at Daten-WG 2026 in Cologne

Shownotes:

Databricks Free Edition (replaces Community Edition): https://www.databricks.com/learn/free-edition

Databricks Excel Add-in: https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/integrations/excel-setup

Apache Ossie: https://ossie.apache.org/

Artur's own article on OSI [German]: https://www.tdwi.eu/wissen/vereinspublikationen

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