The Brickster weekly.

Databricks renamed Vector Search to AI Search and quietly shipped the feature RAG teams have been hacking around for two years: native keyword and hybrid search, no embeddings required. What it means for your retrieval stack. Plus Omnigent graduates to Beta, query history redacts SQL by default, and a brickster.ai milestone: 1,000 monthly active users.

Genie One was the headline of Data + AI Summit 2026: an agent built to be the front door to your data. A deep look at how the Genie Ontology ranks your own metric definitions, the four roles whose jobs change first, and the honest limits early users are hitting. Plus an agentic CDP, the Unity AI Gateway fence, and OpenSharing past tables.

Days before Data + AI Summit 2026, Databricks open-sourced Omnigent, a meta-harness that composes, governs, and shares AI agents across Claude Code, Codex, and Pi without rewriting anything. Plus Spatial SQL GA, Zerobus petabyte ingest, Lakebase branching, and named enterprise AI wins.

Ali Ghodsi called 2026 'a terrible year to go public.' With a $5.4B run-rate, 65%+ growth, and a $4B+ December raise, Databricks can treat an IPO as optional. Inside the patience play. Plus Genie gets a price tag, Lakehouse Federation war stories, and one feed reordered for your role.

MLflow can now route Claude Code through its AI Gateway with full tracing and cost guardrails. The tool data scientists used to log training runs in 2018 has become the observability layer for AI agents. Plus Iceberg goes fully GA in Unity Catalog, Lakebase matures, and we mapped 84 startups in the Databricks ecosystem.

Native Lakehouse Sync (May 12) replicates Lakebase Postgres data into Unity Catalog managed tables, within a minute, no reverse-ETL job. Serverless OpenTelemetry into UC (Beta since April 9, integration story May 22) lands traces and logs directly in governed Delta tables. Plus role-based personalization shipped on brickster.ai.

Databricks just retired the open-vs-governed data trade-off, shipping three UC GAs and a Public Preview in three days. Plus the Consumer Access entitlement that hides the cockpit from business users, and the launch of a public Databricks roadmap on brickster.ai.

Genie quietly became Databricks' BI front door. Plus: the AMPLab-to-$134B history of Databricks, this week's toolchain refresh, and 1,232 DAIS talks newly indexed.