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Review Delta Lake table details with describe detail

You can retrieve detailed information about a Delta table (for example, number of files, data size) using DESCRIBE DETAIL.

SQL
DESCRIBE DETAIL '/data/events/'

DESCRIBE DETAIL eventsTable

For Spark SQL syntax details, see DESCRIBE DETAIL.

See the Delta Lake API documentation for Scala/Java/Python syntax details.

Detail schema

The output of this operation has only one row with the following schema.

note

The columns you see depend on the Databricks Runtime version that you are using and the table features that you’ve enabled.

ColumnTypeDescription
formatstringFormat of the table, that is, delta.
idstringUnique ID of the table.
namestringName of the table as defined in the metastore.
descriptionstringDescription of the table.
locationstringLocation of the table.
createdAttimestampWhen the table was created.
lastModifiedtimestampWhen the table was last modified.
partitionColumnsarray of stringsNames of the partition columns if the table is partitioned.
numFileslongNumber of the files in the latest version of the table.
sizeInBytesintThe size of the latest snapshot of the table in bytes.
propertiesstring-string mapAll the properties set for this table.
minReaderVersionintMinimum version of readers (according to the log protocol) that can read the table.
minWriterVersionintMinimum version of writers (according to the log protocol) that can write to the table.
statisticsmap with string keysAdditional table-level statistics.
tableFeaturesarray of stringsA list of the table features supported by the table. See How does Databricks manage Delta Lake feature compatibility?.
clusteringColumnsarray of stringsThe columns being used for liquid clustering. See Use liquid clustering for Delta tables

Below is an example of what the output looks like:

+------+--------------------+------------------+-----------+--------------------+--------------------+-------------------+----------------+--------+-----------+----------+----------------+----------------+
|format| id| name|description| location| createdAt| lastModified|partitionColumns|numFiles|sizeInBytes|properties|minReaderVersion|minWriterVersion|
+------+--------------------+------------------+-----------+--------------------+--------------------+-------------------+----------------+--------+-----------+----------+----------------+----------------+
| delta|d31f82d2-a69f-42e...|default.deltatable| null|file:/Users/tuor/...|2020-06-05 12:20:...|2020-06-05 12:20:20| []| 10| 12345| []| 1| 2|
+------+--------------------+------------------+-----------+--------------------+--------------------+-------------------+----------------+--------+-----------+----------+----------------+----------------+