Hands-on course running 100% on Databricks Free Edition (the free environment from Databricks). 10 didactic units + a mini-Lakehouse project. The smoothest start before the Associate certification.
Every unit is an executable notebook. You run it, change it, break it, fix it.
Executable, commented, version-controlled.
Sign up at databricks.com and run everything.
Bronze → Silver → Gold with Delta, end-to-end.
Athena answers your doubts citing the lesson.
Compose pipelines with reusable class patterns.
Designed as the cleanest warm-up.
Fundamentals first, then a real mini-Lakehouse you can show in interviews.
The mental model behind the whole course. Drivers, executors, lazy evaluation.
How to declare schemas, why they matter, casting types the right way.
select, filter, withColumn, lit, when. The daily 80% of data engineering.
Reference of patterns you'll come back to a thousand times.
DAG, stages, tasks, shuffles. The "why" behind performance.
Free Edition workspace ready. First end-to-end notebook running.
Read real data, enforce schema, handle the messy parts.
Inner, left, semi/anti. groupBy + agg. Where the real work happens.
Bronze → Silver → Gold with Delta, end-to-end in free.
Refactor the project with class-based patterns you'll use forever.
PySpark on Databricks Free is part of our 6-course family in the Gold Plan — alongside Associate, Professional, GenAI, SDP and DP-750.
The environment is free — Databricks Free Edition lets you run notebooks with no cloud bill. The course content (notebooks, exercises, AI tutor) is a paid product included in our Gold Plan. We use "Free" in the title because the cost barrier — usually cloud compute — is eliminated here.
Basic Python helps but isn't required. The course walks you through Python concepts as they come up.
Any laptop with a browser. All compute runs on Databricks' servers — your machine just renders the notebook UI.
After PySpark Free you'll be comfortable with DataFrames, joins, schemas, and a Lakehouse project — exactly what the Associate course assumes. Most students go straight from one to the other.
Notebooks are EN-ready. Video narration in EN follows in waves through 2026. Athena (our AI tutor) is fully bilingual already.