Postgres has long been a popular OLTP database that can support ACID transactions. Now Databricks, in an effort to push the envelope forward, has released Databricks Lakebase, a PostgreSQL-compatible transactional database designed for high-performance real-time analytics within the Databricks ecosystem.

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) offers robust support for Databricks Lakebase and can help accelerate adoption of the new services by supporting rapid data ingestion and supporting use cases like Customer 360, real time analytics and regulatory compliance.

Databricks Lakebase opens a PostgreSQL-compatible interface, enabling Informatica to connect using its standard PostgreSQL connector. Integration requires configuration of JDBC or ODBC endpoints in Informatica’s platform, ensuring secure access via username, password and SSL settings as appropriate for your environment.

This familiar connectivity approach ensures there’s no need for data engineers and integrators to learn new protocols or connectors, simplifying setup, and reducing time-to-value. From this connection, Informatica pipelines can read, write, and transform data within Databricks Lakebase just as they would with any PostgreSQL database.

Once connected, Informatica empowers organizations to:

• Automate Data Ingestion and Extraction: Seamlessly move data from diverse sources — on-premises systems, cloud applications, IoT devices, and streaming platforms — directly into Databricks Lakebase.
• Perform Data Quality and Enrichment: Apply Informatica’s advanced cleansing, standardization, deduplication, and enrichment transformations before loading data, ensuring datasets are accurate and reliable.
• Enable ELT and Pushdown Optimization: Use Informatica to orchestrate Extract, Load, and Transform workflows where transformations can be pushed down and executed natively in Databricks SQL engines, minimizing data movement and accelerating processing.
• Leverage Metadata-Driven Governance: Harness Informatica’s metadata catalog integrated with Databricks Unity Catalog to deliver unified data lineage, impact analysis, and compliance reporting.
• Support Scalable, Enterprise-grade Data Pipelines: Execute large-scale, performant data workflows capable of handling high throughput and concurrency needs.

The combination of Informatica and Databricks Lakebase supports a broad spectrum of enterprise analytics and AI scenarios, including:

• Customer 360 View: Merge customer interactions, CRM, ERP, and web behavioral data into unified, trusted profiles that power personalized marketing, sales, and support.
• Real-Time Analytics and Operational Dashboards: Stream transactional updates and event data into Lakebase, enabling near real-time decision-making and operational insight through Databricks SQL analytics.
• AI and Machine Learning Data Preparation: Automate the creation of clean, high-quality training datasets from diverse sources with Informatica’s data quality and integration tools, enabling more accurate and trusted ML models.
• Regulatory Compliance and Data Governance: Maintain stringent governance standards by capturing full data lineage and ensuring data policies across transactional and analytical layers are adhered to in highly regulated industries.

By leveraging Informatica's data management power with Databricks Lakebase as the scalable, transactional foundation, organizations achieve:

• Faster Time-to-Insights: Streamlined operational pipelines and pushdown ELT reduce latency from data ingestion to analysis.
• Improved Data Trustworthiness: Embedding data quality and governance upfront ensures BI and AI decisions are made on reliable data.
• Operational Efficiency: Using the generic PostgreSQL connector allows rapid integration without waiting for specialized connectors or custom development.
• Extensibility and Futureproofing: Customers can expand use-cases easily, tapping into the broader Databricks ecosystem or Informatica’s cloud-native services as needs grow.

Together, Informatica and Databricks Lakebase enable enterprises to create trusted, governed, and actionable data foundations — fueling analytics and AI initiatives with agility and confidence.

For more information on how Informatica can help AI-ready, trusted data on Databricks, check out this webinar.