Ascend.io Enhances Integration with Databricks to Boost Transparency and Collaboration in Data Pipeline Automation

MENLO PARK, Calif., June 9, 2023 — Ascend.io, a leader in data pipeline automation, has announced that it has deepened the integration of its Data Pipeline Automation platform with Databricks, the data and AI company, to further enable transparency, collaboration, and productivity.

With this integration, joint customers can now take full advantage of Databricks as a cloud data compute platform in Ascend’s new second-generation remote data plane architecture, which allows users to leverage Ascend’s DataAwareTM control plane within their Databricks lakehouse. In addition, Ascend has released a new free, full-featured developer tier for Databricks so that Ascend customers can take advantage of the latest Databricks capabilities.

Ascend’s Data Pipeline Automation Platform is a single platform with intelligence to detect and propagate change across a company’s ecosystem—ensuring data accuracy and eliminating wasteful spend on data reprocessing. Pipelines powered by Ascend seamlessly ingest, transform, orchestrate, and share data for the business, across the entire end-to-end journey.

Key enhancements powered by the Databricks partnership include:

• Full push-down support for the Databricks SQL compute platform—developers can more easily leverage the powerful compute available in their lakehouse and benefit from an automatic catalog of all the data assets they create. Now available to Ascend customers.
• High-performance data ingestion, and automatic cataloging of all datasets created in Ascend to the Databricks Unity Catalog—data consumers can now search the entire list of all silver and gold datasets in their lakehouse on the unity catalog to significantly improve the amount of data available to their projects. Best of all, this happens automatically without the developer needing to do additional documentation. Now available to Ascend customers.
• The ability to use powerful Databricks transformation capabilities like merge and job batching—giving developers access to the full power of Databricks within the Ascend pipeline builder experience. Now available to Ascend customers.

The integration of Databricks’ powerful data and analytics capabilities with Ascend’s platform increases accessibility, ease of use, and transparency while making it easier to scale support and collaboration across more data teams and business units.

“We’re already seeing many customers that are dramatically accelerating their time to value with Databricks by leveraging Ascend’s data pipeline automation,” said Sean Knapp, Founder and CEO of Ascend.io. “We’re excited to bring these advanced Databricks capabilities to more of our customers to increase engineering velocity, deliver quality data, guarantee data lineage, and troubleshoot faster.”

Through Ascend’s existing partnership with Databricks, developers are able to build intelligent data pipelines within minutes on their data lakehouse architecture, harnessing the most recent Databricks services and endpoints.

“Data-driven organizations are looking for ways to scale their data pipelines as they make a data lakehouse available across their organization,” said Roger Muff, VP ISV Partnerships at Databricks. “With Ascend monitoring changes and propagating them across the system, we see faster and more reliable updates. With the use of the Databricks platform for the underlying compute, it centralizes the management and makes it even more scalable.”

Ascend’s Databricks partnership milestone follows the company’s release of Ascend for Data Mesh as well as the launch of Ascend Free Ingest. Together, these business and product updates signal Ascend’s commitment to addressing the critical cost, complexity and security challenges associated with ingesting data to leading data infrastructure companies in the space.

About Ascend.io

Ascend is the leader in Data Pipeline Automation for building the world’s most intelligent data pipelines. It’s a single platform that detects and propagates change across your ecosystem, ensures data accuracy and quantifies the cost of your data products. Customers can automate up to 90% of repetitive data engineering and reduce infrastructure costs with one place for end-to-end observability and automated lineage tracing. The Ascend intelligent control plane enables customers to automatically detect, manage and propagate change, maintain data integrity, and prevent errors. Customers can also accurately cost data products with metadata-driven insights into team and solution resources used across their landscape. Ascend partners at every step of the data journey with product innovation and expert support that frees customers to focus on achieving goals. Learn more at Ascend.io.

Source: Ascend.io