9. Unified Analytics
You'll understand how to go from production tables to consistent KPIs and business-facing analytics surfaces: metric views, dashboards, Genie, and apps.
Prereqs: 7. Build the first ETL pipeline, 8. Query and Explore, Unity Catalog foundations
Why this matters
Your gold tables are not the finish line. Business users need consistent numbers. They also need a way to reach those numbers without writing SQL.
The next step is planning the semantics and serving layer. Define your KPIs once, in Unity Catalog, so SQL editors, dashboards, Genie, and third-party apps all return the same number. Then surface those metrics through Databricks AI/BI, all querying through a SQL warehouse.
Starter Journey Progress
CI/CD and DevOps
Data Access Control
Automation & Orchestration
Unified AnalyticsDA
Predictive AnalyticsML
AgentsAI
Query and Explore
Build the First Pipeline
Access Your Data
Data Governance Strategy
Cost Monitoring
Infra SetupDEVSTGPRD
Completed Current Pending
Mental model
| Highlight | Layer | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Purple | Tables | The medallion bronze, silver, and gold tables produced by your data engineering pipelines. Every query in the serving layer reads from here. |
| Red | Business semantic layer | Where you define KPIs, business aggregates, concepts, and synonyms once, on top of the tables. Unity Catalog metric views live here. |
| Orange | Data warehousing | All AI/BI tools, applications, and third-party BI apps reach the data through a SQL warehouse. The warehouse is the single query gateway. |
| Green | AI/BI | Genie and Dashboards. The surfaces business users actually interact with. Both read from metric views through the warehouse. |
In this section
| Section | What you'll do |
|---|---|
| Business Semantics | Define KPIs as Unity Catalog metric views so every tool returns the same number. |
| Databricks AI/BI: Dashboards | Build and share visual reports backed by governed lakehouse data. |
| Databricks AI/BI: Genie Spaces | Let business users ask data questions in natural language. |
| Databricks Apps | Build and deploy custom web applications on Databricks. |
Next
- Do next: Business Semantics
- Learn why: Unity Catalog foundations
- Reference: Business semantics in Unity Catalog