Databricks Migration Workshop: From Stored Procedures to Lakehouse (5-Day Intensive) Training Course

Introduction, Objectives, and Migration Strategy

• Course goals, alignment with participant profiles, and success criteria
• High-level migration approaches and associated risk factors
• Configuration of workspaces, repositories, and lab datasets

Day 1 — Migration Fundamentals and Architecture

• Core Lakehouse concepts, Delta Lake overview, and Databricks architecture
• Differences between SMP and MPP and their impact on migration
• Medallion (Bronze→Silver→Gold) architecture design and Unity Catalog introduction

Day 1 Lab — Translating a Stored Procedure

• Practical migration of a sample stored procedure into a notebook
• Mapping temporary tables and cursors to DataFrame transformations
• Validation and comparison against original outputs

Day 2 — Advanced Delta Lake & Incremental Loading

• ACID transactions, commit logs, versioning, and time travel features
• Auto Loader, MERGE INTO patterns, upserts, and schema evolution
• OPTIMIZE, VACUUM, Z-ORDER, partitioning, and storage tuning techniques

Day 2 Lab — Incremental Ingestion & Optimization

• Implementation of Auto Loader ingestion and MERGE workflows
• Application of OPTIMIZE, Z-ORDER, and VACUUM with result validation
• Measurement of read/write performance enhancements

Day 3 — SQL in Databricks, Performance & Debugging

• Analytical SQL capabilities: window functions, higher-order functions, and JSON/array processing
• Interpreting Spark UI, DAGs, shuffles, stages, and tasks for bottleneck diagnosis
• Query tuning strategies: broadcast joins, hints, caching, and reducing spill

Day 3 Lab — SQL Refactoring & Performance Tuning

• Refactoring complex SQL processes into optimized Spark SQL
• Utilizing Spark UI traces to identify and resolve skew and shuffle issues
• Benchmarking before/after performance and documenting tuning steps

Day 4 — Tactical PySpark: Replacing Procedural Logic

• Spark execution model: drivers, executors, lazy evaluation, and partitioning
• Converting loops and cursors into vectorized DataFrame operations
• Modularization, UDFs/pandas UDFs, widgets, and creating reusable libraries

Day 4 Lab — Refactoring Procedural Scripts

• Refactoring procedural ETL scripts into modular PySpark notebooks
• Incorporating parametrization, unit-style tests, and reusable functions
• Conducting code reviews and applying best-practice checklists

Day 5 — Orchestration, End-to-End Pipeline & Best Practices

• Databricks Workflows: job design, task dependencies, triggers, and error handling
• Designing incremental Medallion pipelines with quality rules and schema validation
• Integration with Git (GitHub/Azure DevOps), CI, and testing strategies for PySpark

Day 5 Lab — Build a Complete End-to-End Pipeline

• Assembling a Bronze→Silver→Gold pipeline orchestrated via Workflows
• Implementing logging, auditing, retries, and automated validations
• Executing the full pipeline, validating outputs, and preparing deployment notes

Operationalization, Governance, and Production Readiness

• Unity Catalog governance, lineage, and access control best practices
• Cost management, cluster sizing, autoscaling, and job concurrency patterns
• Deployment checklists, rollback strategies, and runbook development

Final Review, Knowledge Transfer, and Next Steps

• Participant presentations on migration work and key takeaways
• Gap analysis, recommended follow-up activities, and handover of training materials
• References, further learning pathways, and support options