Tellius recently launched the ability to run natural language search queries and automated insights directly on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, powered by Delta Lake. Databricks provides the essential building blocks of a modern data strategy with the Databricks Lakehouse Platform and Delta Lake, an optimized storage layer for data and tables on the data lake. Tellius helps to bridge the gap between data and decisions with true natural language search analytics on billions of rows of data and AI-powered decision intelligence. Combining the flexibility of Delta Lake with Tellius empowers everyone, from data scientists to data analytics and business users, with access to mission-critical business insights.
Written by: Michael Marolda,
Senior Product Marketing Manager at Tellius
In This Post
Delta Lake + the Databricks Lakehouse Platform
For years, data lakes have been touted as the next evolution of the data storage paradigm, and many organizations today leverage data lakes in their data architecture. Data lakes are highly scalable and have the ability to store many different types of data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, at a very low cost. Because data lakes have no predefined schema, they offer the flexibility to hold a wide variety of data, including images, videos, NoSQL databases, time-series data, and much more. They can help organizations centralize their data architecture and eliminate silos by providing a repository for all data.
At the same time, many organizations have struggled with the full promise of the data lake. Because data lakes were not initially thought of as a place for production analytics, they were used as a low-cost storage solution for a company’s flood of raw data. The utilization of a data warehouse was largely seen as a result of the real or perceived lack of performance and reliability from a data lake architecture. Even so, as data usage becomes more intensive at organizations, the cost and problems associated with managing a data warehouse only rise. Companies also have increasingly realized the business risk associated with vendor lock-in due to the proprietary storage formats of data warehouses. This has led organizations to look for new solutions to the problem of managing data and also led to the rise of the open data lakehouse paradigm.
Delta Lake makes data on the data lake more accessible and reliable by providing data warehouse-like capabilities on top of the lake. Delta Lake is an open-storage format layer optimized for file-based storage. It includes metadata, caching, and indexing and is compatible with query engines like Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Presto, and Trino. It essentially combines the best aspects of the data warehouse—reliability and performance—with the scale of a data lake. Delta Lake does this by leveraging Parquet files with a file-based transaction log for ACID transactions and scalable metadata handling. As an open-source format storage layer, Delta Lake reduces the business risk of vendor lock-in. Taken in aggregate, Delta Lake has made the promise of the open data lakehouse into a reality for many organizations.
What is AI-Powered Decision Intelligence?
While Databricks and Delta Lake have been redefining how companies leverage data lakes in their data architecture, legacy business intelligence has been undergoing a similar evolution with new decision intelligence platforms like Tellius. Legacy business intelligence platforms are designed to focus on descriptive analytics, which can take the form of reports, dashboards, and other static ways for organizations to understand how their data is changing. A business intelligence user needs to analyze the information available in these dashboards and synthesize the analysis into insights. This requires a deep understanding of the data and the ability to analyze the data to find these key insights. This process can be time-consuming and restricts insight generation to a limited group of people in the organization.
AI-powered decision intelligence is the next step in the evolution of business intelligence. Decision intelligence provides not just descriptive, but also diagnostic and predictive, analytics to the end user. These platforms deliver dynamic recommendations on the best next steps to a problem and can utilize natural language to simplify the process of moving from a business question to a data search query. Decision intelligence helps democratize data by providing intelligent automation to insight generation by leveraging AI throughout the platform, dramatically shortening the path from business question to data-driven decision. Decision intelligence can help unlock self-service analytics by augmenting users’ ability to deliver insights across the organization.
Tellius was designed from the ground up to leverage AI throughout its platform to help organizations move from mission-critical problems to answers faster than ever. The platform includes natural language search, arming more people in an organization with a tool to ask questions of the data. Tellius also leverages AI-driven automation and data analysis to uncover key drivers, patterns, anomalies, and segments. This automated insight generation saves analysts, data scientists, and business users hours or even days of analysis work. In fact, the entire data lifecycle has been automated with Tellius, including automated data prep, visualizations, insights, machine learning, and more. Tellius provides a path for your entire organization to deliver self-service analytics and become truly data-driven.
Benefits of the Decision Lakehouse
With Tellius and the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, organizations leveraging Delta Lake can now open data access with a decision intelligence platform. With Tellius, users create natural language search queries and run AI-powered automated insights directly on the lakehouse, unlocking critical business insights. Answering ad hoc business questions on the lakehouse has never been easier with Tellius and Delta Lake. While previously, businesses needed to plod through a number of dashboards and reports or leverage SQL queries to find answers to critical business questions, now data analysts and business users can ask questions with a Google-like interface and with one click to understand why metrics have changed. Combining Tellius’ true natural language search and automated insights with Delta Lake unlocks true augmented self-service analytics for organizations.
Open Up Access to the Lakehouse for More Users
With Tellius’ Delta Lake connection, users can now analyze petabytes worth of data on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform without moving the data. This decrease in data movement allows users to directly access Delta Lake’s gold layer tables for analytics at scale. This new capability provides access directly to the lakehouse for data analysts and business users, opening new lines of inquiry for critical business questions.
Identify Previously Invisible Patterns and Insights
Tellius also makes it easier to unearth actionable insights from all the data available on Delta Lake with AI-powered automated insights. Automated insights analysis is used to uncover root causes, understand key business drivers, compare cohorts, and identify meaningful segments in your lakehouse. Business users and data analysts can now understand the cause of the change in metrics or KPIs to make better decisions faster.
Fast Deployment Built for Scale
With Tellius on Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform, organizations can be up and running with a modern augmented analytics platform faster than ever. Deployment with Tellius can be achieved in minutes with an intuitive setup process. The simple deployment of Tellius, combined with a point-and-click data preparation tool, allows more users to bring the data they need to uncover mission-critical insights. Tellius also includes the Dual Analytics Engine, allowing you the flexibility to either import data in-memory or leverage Spark to connect with data in the lakehouse. These two methods of data access offer unparalleled scale for the most data-intensive organizations in the world.
Advanced Analytics for All
AI and ML insights and predictions are now more consumable than ever with Tellius and Delta Lake. Machine learning workloads built in Databricks can be accessed via natural language search, making the path to production with business users quicker than ever. Tellius also offers autoML with point-and-click customization. Key capabilities include the ability to build models for regression, classification, time series, clustering, recommendations, and predictive analytics. With Tellius, more Delta Lake and Databricks Lakehouse Platform users can run explainable advanced analytics at scale.
Decision Intelligence Lakehouse Use Cases
Tellius and Databricks provide significant benefits. Here are a few real-world use cases:
↳ Improving Customer Experience: A retail company combined data from customer interactions, transactions, and feedback in their data lake and used Tellius to automate large portions of creating a 360-degree customer view. They then used natural language search to analyze this data to identify patterns and insights to improve the customer experience, such as personalizing recommendations, providing better support, and identifying potential issues before they become problems.
↳ Fraud Detection: A leading financial institution consolidated data from various sources in their data lake, including transactional, customer, and third-party data. They then analyzed this data in real time to identify unusual patterns or transactions that could be indicative of fraud. This helped them spot and prevent fraudulent activities and reduce losses.
↳ Predictive Maintenance: A North American manufacturing company with a lakehouse platform consolidated data from sensors, maintenance logs, and other IoT devices. They now use Tellius to identify patterns and insights to predict when a machine is likely to fail, enabling proactive maintenance, which helps prevent unexpected downtime and reduces costs.
↳ Supply-Chain Optimization: A global logistics company uses Tellius to analyze data from weather forecasts, traffic patterns, and inventory levels to identify patterns and insights that can help optimize the supply chain, such as predicting delivery times, improving route planning, and managing inventory levels.
↳ Healthcare Analytics: A healthcare system consisting of 100+ hospitals relies on the combination of a data lakehouse platform for electronic medical records, patient feedback, and insurance claims data. Tellius is used on top to identify patterns and insights that can help improve patient outcomes and reduce costs of, for example, identifying patients at risk of readmission, personalizing treatment plans, and reducing medication errors.
Conclusion
The path from data to insights has never been easier with the Delta Lake connection with Tellius. The Tellius decision intelligence platform includes features like natural language querying, automated insights, and autoML, upskilling data analysts and business users, and unlocking key insights for your entire business. The union of a scalable storage solution with AI-powered decision intelligence democratizes data analytics for your organization. Learn more about the Tellius and Databricks partnership here.
