Discovering feature stores on the Databricks platform

Each Databricks workspace has its own feature store. At the time of writing this book, Databricks Feature Store only supports the Python API. The latest Python API reference is located at https://docs.databricks.com/applications/machine-learning/feature-store/python-api.html.

Databricks Feature Store is fully integrated with Managed MLFlow and other Databricks components. This allows models that are deployed by utilizing MLFlow to automatically retrieve the features at the time of training and inference. The exact steps involved in defining a feature table and using it with model training and inference are going to be covered in the following sections.

Let’s look at some of the key concepts and terminology associated with Databricks Feature Store.

Feature table

As the name suggests, a feature store stores features generated by data scientists after doing feature engineering for a particular problem.

These features...