Data Novera
Databricks

A Lakehouse, Sized for a Growing Business

Databricks is one of the platforms we know well. It's a good fit when you want reporting and AI on the same governed data. It isn't always the right choice, and we'll say so when it isn't.

Reference Architecture

One governed platform, every workload

From raw data to reports and AI applications, with lineage tracked the whole way.

Ingestion & Storage
Bronze Layer— Raw, append-only ingestion
Silver Layer— Cleansed, conformed models
Gold Layer— Business-ready aggregates
Lakeflow— Declarative pipelines
Governance
Unity Catalog— Access control, lineage, audit, and data quality across every layer
Intelligence
Mosaic AI— Model serving & agents
MLflow— Experiment & model registry
Vector Search— Retrieval for RAG
AI Functions— SQL-native inference
Consumption
BI & Dashboards
AI Agents
Enterprise Apps
Executive Reporting
Platform Capabilities

The parts of Databricks we use most

Lakehouse

A single platform for BI, data science, and AI — eliminating duplicate copies and stale exports.

Delta Lake

ACID transactions, time travel, and schema enforcement on top of open Parquet storage.

Unity Catalog

Centralized access control, lineage, and audit across every workspace and workload.

Mosaic AI

Model serving, agent orchestration, and governed access to foundation models.

MLflow

Experiment tracking, model registry, and reproducible deployment pipelines.

Vector Search

Managed embeddings and retrieval infrastructure powering production RAG.

Lakeflow

Declarative, auto-scaling pipelines for ingestion and transformation at scale.

AI Functions

Call LLMs directly from SQL for classification, extraction, and summarization.

Feature Engineering

A governed feature store shared across models and teams for consistent inference.

Governance isn’t an afterthought

When we build on Databricks, we set up Unity Catalog from the start. It handles access rules, masking of sensitive columns, and lineage from raw data through to the dashboards and AI tools that use it. You can always see where a number came from and who can see it.

  • Column and row-level access policies enforced centrally
  • Automatic lineage from source tables to dashboards and agents
  • PII/PHI masking applied consistently across every tool
  • Full audit trail for every query and model inference

Thinking about a new data platform?

Tell us what you're running today and what's getting in the way. We'll help you figure out whether Databricks, or something simpler, makes sense.