Your Databricks Investment, Now in Every Business User's Hands
Analysts, portfolio managers, and traders at a leading investment firm can now easily find information, verify its source, and ask questions in plain language. All through a single, business-friendly interface.
The Challenge
Data business users couldn't reach
The client is a global alternative investment manager. Its Databricks platform was in good shape: data governed in Unity Catalog, lineage tracked, and Genie Spaces already built for portfolio analytics, finance and trading.
The gap was on the business side. Business users who needed that data the most had no easy way in. Finding a dataset meant navigating the Databricks workspace, and any question they couldn't answer themselves became a ticket for engineering.
The ontology made it harder. Each investment strategy had its own vocabulary and naming conventions, so a search for "finance" had to look across table names, column names and descriptions at once to return anything useful.
- fct_pnl_dly
- gl_txn_hist
- acct_mstr
- pos_hldg_eod
- strat_ref_map
The Solution
One front door to the whole platform
The portal is a Databricks App designed specifically for business users. It sits on top of Unity Catalog and gives users a single place to find data and ask questions.
Find the data
Search looks across table names, column names, and their descriptions at the same time. A search for "investment" surfaces everything relevant, not just tables with that word in the name. Users can also browse by business area.
- Investment performanceReturns by strategy and periodTable name
- Portfolio holdingsPositions by investment and fundColumn name
- Fund commitmentsCommitments for each investment vehicleDescription
- Property valuationsAppraisals for each real estate investmentNewDescription
Ask in plain language
An "Ask" functionality lets users type questions in everyday words. Behind the scenes, a supervisor agent picks the right Genie Space to answer, sends the question there, and brings back one clear response. Users don't have to know what a Genie Space is or which one to pick.
Security carries through
Everything runs with the signed-in user's own permissions: search, data previews and answers. If someone can't access a dataset, they won't see it in search, preview it, or get an answer built from it. The governance set in Unity Catalog applies everywhere in the app.
- Investment performanceReturns by strategy and period
- Portfolio holdingsPositions by investment and fund
- Fund commitmentsCommitments for each investment vehicle
- General ledgerEntries by investment and period
Illustrative representation. Not client data.
The Project in Under Two Minutes
From a data team's platform to one every business user can reach
The Results
More people using the platform the firm already had
The firm now has one governed entry point to its data platform. Business users can find datasets, judge how far to trust them, trace where they come from and ask questions across investment domains, each seeing only what they're cleared to see.
Fewer engineering tickets for routine data discovery and questions.
Hidden datasets now found, because search follows how business users think about data, not how tables happen to be named.
Databricks use growing beyond the data team, with Unity Catalog now a business asset people navigate and query every day.
The firm didn't need a new platform.
It needed more people using the one it had.
