Review table details with describe detail

Use DESCRIBE DETAIL to retrieve detailed metadata about a Delta Lake or Apache Iceberg table, including file count, data size, partition columns, and enabled table features.

For example:

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

Note

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

The output of the DESCRIBE DETAIL operation has only one row with the following schema:

Column Type Description
format string Format of the table (for example, delta or iceberg).
id string Unique ID of the table.
name string Name of the table as defined in the metastore.
description string Description of the table.
location string Location of the table.
createdAt timestamp When the table was created.
lastModified timestamp When the table was last modified.
partitionColumns array of strings Names of the partition columns if the table is partitioned.
numFiles long Number of files in the latest version of the table.
sizeInBytes int Size of the latest snapshot of the table in bytes.
properties string-string map All the properties set for this table.
minReaderVersion int Minimum version of readers (according to the log protocol) that can read the table.
minWriterVersion int Minimum version of writers (according to the log protocol) that can write to the table.
statistics map with string keys Additional table-level statistics.
tableFeatures array of strings A list of the table features supported by the table. See Delta Lake feature compatibility and protocols.
clusteringColumns array of strings The columns being used for liquid clustering. See Use liquid clustering for tables.

Example output:

+------+--------------------+------------------+-----------+--------------------+--------------------+-------------------+----------------+--------+-----------+----------+----------------+----------------+
|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|
+------+--------------------+------------------+-----------+--------------------+--------------------+-------------------+----------------+--------+-----------+----------+----------------+----------------+
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