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This is a free of charge (my favourite hehe), cloud based platform we have put together for you to play around with Apache Spark, SQL, Python, and more and it’s all online which means you don’t have to do any installation of software at all. If you are a student, early career engineer, or a complete newby to big data, this is the right place to start out.
🔥 What Is Databricks Community Edition?
Databricks Community Edition is a limited but highly functional version of the full Databricks platform. It was built around Apache Spark, a powerful engine for processing large-scale data. Spark is often complex to set up locally — and that’s exactly why Databricks was created: to make working with Spark easier, faster, and more accessible.
With Community Edition, you can run code directly in your browser using interactive notebooks. Think Jupyter Notebooks, but fully integrated with Spark, hosted in the cloud, and accessible from anywhere – sorry VScode users 😉
💡 Why It’s Great for Beginners
Here’s why Databricks Community Edition is ideal if you’re just starting out:
- ✅ No installation required – everything runs in the cloud.
- ✅ Free to use – just create an account and start experimenting.
- ✅ Supports SQL, Python, Scala, and R.
- ✅ Notebooks feel familiar if you’ve used Jupyter before.
- ✅ Real-time Spark jobs — run code that mimics real-world big data pipelines.
- ✅ Learn ML and data engineering workflows without setting up infrastructure.
You can even build your first portfolio project here and share notebooks with others — a great way to show your skills to potential employers.
⚙️ What Can You Do With It?
Once once you get set up (which only takes a few minutes) you can:
- Develop and execute notebooks with Apache Spark.
- Practice building out your SQL queries and Spark jobs.
- Learn data engineering practices which include ETL, data transformations and pipeline scheduling.
- Experiment with machine learning models Connect and analyze your own datasets
Start to put together a portfolio of practical work which you did. For those which are new to Spark this is the best and safest way to get started.
🔒 Are There Any Limitations?
Yes, but as expected as it’s free:
- You can only run one cluster at a time.
- Your cluster will auto-shutdown after some idle time.
- It’s not designed for production use, just learning and prototyping.
But honestly, for personal learning and experimentation, this is will be all you need.
📈 Final Thoughts
If you are set on to become a data engineer or a data scientist Databricks Community Edition is a great resource for you. It is free, easy to access, and designed for beginners. Also, you get the chance to work with the tools which are used in live data teams out of which the best part is that it is free and has no complex setup. If you’re interested to give it a go just head over to Databricks Community Edition, sign up in a few minutes and we’re off.
I will also share at the blog and on the YouTube channel which will be easy to follow along walk through’s, tips, and tutorials do check that out also 🙂
Let me know in the comments if there’s something you’d like me to cover next — and happy learning! 🙌