News from the Databricks ecosystem.
Posts from databricks.com, MLflow, and dbt Labs — three trusted sources covering the platform, the open-source projects around it, and the data tooling layer most teams pair with it. Summarized for scanning.
This week
30 articlesThe Partner Well-Architected Framework: What's New and What's Next
The Partner Well-Architected Framework (PWAF) now includes the AI Partner Dev Kit, expanded architecture patterns, and the Firefly reference application to accelerate development and simplify integrations for partners. These new capabilities provide AI-ready architecture guidance and best practices for building on or connecting to Databricks.
What’s coming next to Free Edition
Databricks Free Edition now includes every core practitioner feature, expanding with Genie Code, GPUs, Lakebase, Lakeflow Designer, and Agent Bricks. This gives users a complete, free toolkit for building end-to-end data and AI projects.
Becoming the most comprehensive data & AI ecosystem on earth
Databricks is expanding its Data and AI partner ecosystem with new Marketplace, Apps, OpenSharing, and Genie Agent capabilities for building, distributing, sharing, and monetizing solutions. These updates accelerate deal velocity, provide access to 20,000+ Databricks customers, and unlock new AI-era business models like pay-per-question.
Design Beautiful Dashboards in AI/BI
Databricks AI/BI now offers dashboard themes to customize fonts, colors, and visualization palettes for on-brand dashboards. Apply workspace themes once to automatically carry your theme across all dashboards.
What’s new in Genie Code at Data + AI Summit 2026
Genie Code now features a full-page command center for managing complex, multi-threaded data and ML work, providing thread status, review points, and quick access to instructions, skills, and connectors. Scheduled tasks and Genie ZeroOps are coming soon to enable autonomous execution and extend automation into data and ML operations.
What’s new in Databricks Platform security and compliance at Data + AI Summit 2026
Automatic Identity Management (AIM) for Entra ID is now GA on AWS and GCP, with AIM for Okta in Public Preview, alongside new Context-Based Ingress policies and expanded Private Link support for Lakebase and account-level services. Databricks also announced new certifications, regional compliance programs, broader AWS GovCloud support for AI services, and upcoming FedRAMP High support on Azure Commercial.
Building an open ecosystem for AI governance with Unity AI Gateway
Unity AI Gateway now integrates with 10 security vendors to protect AI interactions and 3 identity providers to govern AI agent access. This enables centralized visibility and control over AI activity, policy enforcement, and risk management across models, agents, and tools.
What’s New in the AI Platform: Agents for ML Engineering, Our Deep Learning Platform, and New Capabilities for Real-Time ML
Databricks shipped Genie Code, a coding agent for ML engineering, and AI Runtime, a serverless GPU platform for deep learning. Power real-time ML at scale with new Feature Store and Model Serving capabilities, including streaming features and high-QPS serving.
Introducing the Agentic CDP: A New Species of CDP for a New Era of Agents
Databricks announces the Agentic CDP, a new species of CDP designed for the era of AI agents. It combines Golden Context, Infinity Campaigns, and native data foundation integration to power real-time, always-on 1:1 personalization.
Start fresh, don't lift and shift: a dbt migration guide
Databricks now has a dbt migration guide that argues against lifting and shifting legacy patterns. Learn how to start fresh with dbt instead of rebuilding old habits.
What is data pipeline architecture?
Data pipeline architecture separates ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving into distinct layers, with ELT largely replacing ETL as the dominant approach. Databricks unifies batch and streaming pipelines on a single platform (Lakeflow + Delta Lake + Unity Catalog), eliminating duplicate infrastructure and governance gaps.
The analytics engineer in 2026: system designer, governance owner, AI context provider
The analytics engineer role is evolving to encompass system design, governance, and AI context provision. Learn how these responsibilities will define the role by 2026.
How dbt makes agentic data pipelines trustworthy: the transformation layer's role in autonomous data systems
Databricks practitioners can now leverage dbt as the transformation layer to ensure trustworthiness in agentic data pipelines. This post argues that dbt defines correctness within autonomous data systems, enabling AI agents to run pipelines reliably.
Context engineering is the new analytics engineering skill: a practical guide for dbt users
Context engineering is now a core analytics engineering skill, and this guide shows dbt users how their projects can become context for AI. Learn how to leverage your existing dbt work to enhance AI applications.
Building the agentic data stack: A practical dbt guide for the AI era
Databricks now supports an agentic data stack. Learn how to prepare your dbt project to robustly support AI agents.
The trust-speed paradox: Governing AI-accelerated data work
Databricks Pulse reveals 72% of data teams use AI to write code, yet only 24% invest in checking its output. Learn how to bridge this trust-speed paradox and effectively govern AI-accelerated data work.
Enabling Governed Vibe Coding for Enterprise Apps on Databricks
Databricks announced App Spaces, Genie App Builder, and a new micro app runtime at Data + AI Summit 2026, enabling governed vibe coding for enterprise applications. These capabilities provide data context and control, allowing teams to build apps quickly without sacrificing governance, cost, or data control.
Introducing OpenSharing: the Next Evolution of Delta Sharing for the Agentic Era
When Databricks pioneered Delta Sharing in 2021, we set out to solve a problem that...
Announcing Apps on Databricks Marketplace
Databricks Marketplace now supports apps, allowing you to instantly access and deploy powerful data and AI applications directly within your secure, governed Unity Catalog environment. This enables providers to securely distribute and monetize proprietary data apps to thousands of Databricks customers.
Introducing OpenSharing SecureConnect
OpenSharing SecureConnect introduces a Databricks-managed proxy for storage access, eliminating the need for data providers to configure network for each recipient. Providers can optionally leverage NCC for private link connectivity between the proxy and their storage.
Sciene AI Companion: building an autonomous Customer Success platform on Databricks
Sciene built an autonomous Customer Success platform on Databricks, enabling AI-powered CSMs to standardize and scale work with context-aware emails, meeting decks, and account diagnostics. This end-to-end Databricks solution, leveraging Delta Sharing, Lakebase, and SQL Warehouses, significantly improved productivity and saved up to 6x time on key workflows.
Agent Bricks: Data + AI Summit 2026
Last year at the Data + AI Summit, we launched Agent Bricks, ushering in a new way...
What’s new with Unity Catalog at Data + AI Summit 2026
Unity AI Gateway now extends Unity Catalog's runtime governance to AI agents, models, and tools, allowing you to govern agent actions, not just data access. Glossary and Domains provide a shared, governed source of business context for both people and agents, while a single catalog and policy set ensure consistent governance across all clouds and regions.
AI governance at Data + AI Summit 2026: What’s new with Unity AI Gateway
Unity AI Gateway now offers unified cost management, governance for AI assets and interactions, and monitoring for AI activity at scale. These new capabilities, announced at Data + AI Summit 2026, extend Unity Catalog to models, agents, and services, while providing spend visibility, runtime controls, and security features.
Announcing the new Databricks Startup Program
The new Databricks Startup Program offers qualifying startups up to $200K in credits for Databricks and Neon, alongside technical guidance and go-to-market support. This consolidated program provides a single application point for founders to access all Databricks resources.
Lakeflow: A new era of agentic data engineering
Lakeflow unifies ingestion, transformation, and orchestration under Unity Catalog, providing a single source of trusted, real-time context for agentic AI. It offers high-performance ingestion from 100+ sources, real-time streaming, visual pipeline building with Lakeflow Designer, and AI-powered authoring and operations with Genie Code and Genie ZeroOps.
Announcing Lakebase Search: agent-native retrieval built into Lakebase Postgres
Today, we're introducing Lakebase Search: hybrid vector and full-text retrieval built...
Accelerate search queries with full-text search indexes on Databricks
Databricks now offers full-text search indexes in Beta, accelerating substring and keyword queries on Unity Catalog managed tables with a simple SQL statement and no application changes. Production teams are seeing over 100x speedups on petabyte-scale tables, unlocking new use cases.
Unifying Data and Governance in the Agentic Era: What’s New with Azure Databricks
Azure Databricks now offers new capabilities for unifying data and governance in the agentic era, including the industry's first true LTAP architecture, serverless Postgres database branching, and millisecond-level response times via Lakehouse//RT. These updates also bring Genie for Microsoft Teams and M365 Copilot, the new Azure Databricks Excel Add-in, and Azure Databricks CustomerLake, a lakehouse-embedded Agentic CDP.
Introducing Genie ZeroOps: Put your data and AI operations on autopilot
Genie ZeroOps, a new background agent built into Databricks, automates monitoring, investigation, and proposed fixes for your data and AI assets. This platform-integrated agent addresses the growing burden of maintenance by autonomously managing pipelines, jobs, tables, and ML models, freeing your team to focus on building.