Weekly briefings

Databricks' Agent Memory lets custom AI agents carry preferences, corrections and useful past work into later conversations. How it works, what it costs and three checks before a pilot. Plus AI Runtime reaching general availability, how Databricks keeps its own AI bill in check, CustomerLake Campaign Agents and two November deadlines.

A new buyer survey shows AI agents cost more than expected. What Databricks changed, and three checks for your 2027 AI budget: ownership, spending limits and the full cost of useful work. Plus Proofpoint's proposed Varonis deal, Responsive joining Databricks, FOX expanding its partnership and AI help for SQL migrations.

Genie Code CLI brings Databricks' coding agent to the terminal, and bills it through Unity Gateway instead of Genie. Plus four models switching off by November 5, Genie One running the numbers on spreadsheets, a CLI upgrade that can stop a deployment, and budget alerts that arrive a day late.

AI that sorts, flags and chooses. What a decision model does, why Databricks moved fast with ai_decide, and where your team could start. Plus fresher spreadsheets, a better memory for Genie, clearer SQL costs, more security data, and on FlutterBricks a free course to a badge and how to keep your credentials when you change jobs.

Databricks bought Row Zero, a cloud spreadsheet that connects straight to company data, to build into Genie. What Row Zero is, what's promised and what isn't yet (no launch date, no price), and our read on why Databricks wanted a spreadsheet of its own. Plus Genie App Builder and App Spaces reach Beta and whether to try them now, Genie still bills questions asked by software, shared metrics with partners, one setup for AI coding assistants, contracts turned into tables, and easier quiz pages on FlutterBricks.

Unity Catalog Skills makes the instructions your AI agents follow a governed catalog object: a skill is a securable you grant like a table, with audit, and the tutorials call it Unity Gateway Skills because the docs have not settled on one name. What the Beta promises, what it takes to adopt, and where it stops (no publishing under the compliance profile). Plus compliance becomes the default across Unity Gateway and Databricks Apps, one ABAC policy across a whole metastore, Lakebase gets a snapshots API, Genie One drops its workspace requirement.

Between September 1 and September 11, Unity Gateway added a hosted model from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and DeepSeek, all callable through Foundation Model APIs. Four labs, four release notes, eleven days apart. What a multi-model gateway changes for your architecture, your procurement and your AI bill, and why nothing about routing is automatic. Plus the Excel Add-in reaches GA, a reference pattern for agents that survive crashes, marketing data lands as governed tables, Lakebase gets a cache rework, and FlutterBricks crosses 1,500 monthly active users with the Learn and Jobs launches.

Automatic change data feed went GA, so change data feed stops being a decision you make in advance, except on the tables where you were most likely to want it: row filters and column masks are excluded, and those are the governance features you apply to sensitive data. We put the two Databricks pages side by side, including the 15 percent faster claim that appears on one and not the other, and listed what enabling row tracking on an existing table actually costs. Plus the DBR 19 unified release model that retires pinning a minor version, the pipeline_events system table in Beta with a rename already scheduled, and four hosted models in nine days.

Genie One grew a desktop app and learned to draft executive-ready reports, so the AI's answer to 'how much did we spend' now lands in documents people act on. We walked the docs and counted the eight instruments Databricks ships for trusting an AI-generated number, found where the verified badge stops traveling, and put the accuracy claims next to the tribunal ruling that priced a wrong chatbot answer at CAD 812.02. Plus Governance Hub, Lakebase splitting Postgres in two, PyTorch training that expects dying GPUs, and Signal, our new radar over the archive.

Importing Power BI and Tableau files into Databricks AI/BI went GA. We read the docs end to end: the template-not-data trap, the screenshot advice, the toggles that must be on, and the metric view rules that decide what survives the trip. Plus the bundle engine flip with a seatbelt, DBR 13.3 LTS out of support, a precision mode for document extraction, and access control that can tell an agent from a person.

We browsed Databricks Marketplace inside a real workspace and sorted the whole catalog. It is overwhelmingly a data store: tables outnumber apps by more than fifty to one. The notebook shelf is a map of where buyers are stuck, mostly still leaving older systems behind, while the apps shelf is largely software for running Databricks itself. Yet the listings people actually reach for are a bridge to Excel and safe stand-in data for testing. Plus the week in plain language: Genie in production, guardrails, tooling and storage.

A UK government lab reported AI agents acting outside their instructions during cyber testing, and one human code review stopped the worst attempt: what the incident shows, with every caveat attached. Plus materialized views learning to publish their changes in Beta, the Genie connector re-approval that needs a person, a GA label with Beta parts inside, four questions that grade any vendor benchmark, and Kimi K3 six days after a letter from Congress.

Databricks completed its Panther acquisition on August 3, but Lakewatch, the security product it feeds, is still an invite-only preview with no committed date for wider availability. What the Security Lakehouse pitch actually means, and the Snowflake Ventures irony behind it. Plus Genie's first real bill, the 28-question fine print behind the 84.5% claim, the engineering calendar's one hard deadline, and Variant reaching General Availability.

Unity Catalog Discover and Domains entered Public Preview: browse trusted tables, dashboards, and Genie Agents by business domain instead of doing catalog.schema archaeology, with steward certification feeding straight into Genie Ontology. Plus Genie escaping the chat box into the CLI, S3 Delegated IAM killing the 140-line IAM ritual, Omnigent's intent-based authorization, and the dbt Core v2.0 shakeup.

On July 16, Databricks signed a term sheet at a $188B valuation — $54B above the round it closed in February, past even the top of the rumor range. The valuation ladder, where the capital is earmarked, and the 2027 IPO question. Plus Apache Spark 4.2 ships with a native semantic layer, vector search, geospatial, and Auto CDC, two frontier models land already governed, and Databricks tries to mint the context engineer.

Agent Bricks is Databricks' bet that the model is 1% of the work and the other 99% (token capacity, governance, evaluation, memory) is what gets an agent to production. Plus Omnigent's session-aware contextual policies, Genie's new pay-as-you-go billing, Feature Views in Public Preview, and the DABs-anchored release wave.

As of July 6, the whole Genie family moved to pay-as-you-go: 150 free DBUs per user per month, then usage-based billing. The real cost math, the service-principal trap that gets no free tier, and why Unity AI Gateway budget controls landing the same week isn't a coincidence. Plus the Asset Bundles rename, Genie in Slack, and an SDK refresh.

Databricks renamed Vector Search to AI Search and quietly shipped the feature RAG teams have been hacking around for two years: native keyword and hybrid search, no embeddings required. What it means for your retrieval stack. Plus Omnigent graduates to Beta, query history redacts SQL by default, and a FlutterBricks milestone: 1,000 monthly active users.

Genie One was the headline of Data + AI Summit 2026: an agent built to be the front door to your data. A deep look at how the Genie Ontology ranks your own metric definitions, the four roles whose jobs change first, and the honest limits early users are hitting. Plus an agentic CDP, the Unity AI Gateway fence, and OpenSharing past tables.

Days before Data + AI Summit 2026, Databricks open-sourced Omnigent, a meta-harness that composes, governs, and shares AI agents across Claude Code, Codex, and Pi without rewriting anything. Plus Spatial SQL GA, Zerobus petabyte ingest, Lakebase branching, and named enterprise AI wins.

Ali Ghodsi called 2026 'a terrible year to go public.' With a $5.4B run-rate, 65%+ growth, and a $4B+ December raise, Databricks can treat an IPO as optional. Inside the patience play. Plus Genie gets a price tag, Lakehouse Federation war stories, and one feed reordered for your role.

MLflow can now route Claude Code through its AI Gateway with full tracing and cost guardrails. The tool data scientists used to log training runs in 2018 has become the observability layer for AI agents. Plus Iceberg goes fully GA in Unity Catalog, Lakebase matures, and we mapped 84 startups in the Databricks ecosystem.

Native Lakehouse Sync (May 12) replicates Lakebase Postgres data into Unity Catalog managed tables, within a minute, no reverse-ETL job. Serverless OpenTelemetry into UC (Beta since April 9, integration story May 22) lands traces and logs directly in governed Delta tables. Plus role-based personalization shipped on FlutterBricks.

Databricks just retired the open-vs-governed data trade-off, shipping three UC GAs and a Public Preview in three days. Plus the Consumer Access entitlement that hides the cockpit from business users, and the launch of a public Databricks roadmap on FlutterBricks.

Genie quietly became Databricks' BI front door. Plus: the AMPLab-to-$134B history of Databricks, this week's toolchain refresh, and 1,232 DAIS talks newly indexed.