Right-Sizing Your Databricks Cluster: A 500 GB Case Study

A Practical Guide to Shuffle Partitions, Executor Sizing, and Handling Data Skew.

Say we’re processing a dataset of 500 GB in Databricks. How would you configure the cluster to achieve optimal performance?

Most engineers either over-provision (wasting $) or under-provision (OOM crashes at 3 AM).

Here’s a practical guide based on best practices and real-world experience.

📊 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: 𝗙𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝗦𝗵𝘂𝗳𝗳𝗹𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿…