start hereBeginner

Lakehouse Foundations

How the Databricks platform is put together: control plane and compute, Delta Lake as the storage format, Unity Catalog as the governance layer, and the medallion pattern everything else builds on.

0 of 9 done
Data Engineer Associate
9 of 9 written|~20 h
Steps through the path one concept at a time, in order.100%
01The platform
02Storage
03Governance
04Working in the lakehouse
01Architecture of the Data Intelligence Platform
02Choosing compute: all-purpose, job cluster, serverless, SQL warehouse
03Delta Lake, the lakehouse table format
04Managed and external tables
05Unity Catalog, the governance layer
06Medallion architecture: bronze, silver, gold
07Git folders: branches, commits, pull requests
08Notebooks
09Workspace files and volumes
Platform & governanceData engineering · Lakeflow
Drag to pan · scroll to zoom · click a task to open it · the small button says what it covers
The same path as a list9 concepts
Stage 1 · The platform
Architecture of the Data Intelligence PlatformChoosing compute: all-purpose, job cluster, serverless, SQL warehouse
Stage 2 · Storage
Delta Lake, the lakehouse table formatManaged and external tables
Stage 3 · Governance
Unity Catalog, the governance layer
Stage 4 · Working in the lakehouse
Medallion architecture: bronze, silver, goldGit folders: branches, commits, pull requestsNotebooksWorkspace files and volumes

Start here if Databricks is new to you. Seven concepts that make every other path readable: what runs where, what a table really is, who is allowed to read it, and how raw data becomes something a dashboard can trust.

After this path, pick Data Engineering to build pipelines or Governance & Security to go deeper on Unity Catalog.

Full resources for this path

13 free
Newsletter

What changed, and what it means for you

Databricks renames and deprecates things often. Get the ones that actually change how you work, plus the concepts rewritten because of them. No more than the schedule below, and one click to leave.

Choose what you get5 of 43
Your stack · Platform & governance

Tick what you run, and untick “Everything worth knowing” to get only that.

Data engineering · Lakeflow
Data warehousing & BI
AI & ML
Your learning paths

Each one is a section of the letter, and you only get the ones you tick. Every email carries a link back to this list, so you can change it later without an account.

Double opt-in: we send one email to check the address is yours. Nothing else until you confirm.