September 2026
Databricks released these features and improvements in September 2026.
Releases are staged. Your Databricks account might not be updated until a week or more after the initial release date.
Standard performance mode is now available for one-time runs in the Jobs API
September 11, 2026
You can now set performance_target to STANDARD in the Jobs API. Apache Airflow's DatabricksSubmitRunOperator also supports this. See Create and trigger a one-time run and Select a performance mode.
Sharing foreign Iceberg tables with OpenSharing is now generally available
September 11, 2026
Sharing and reading foreign Iceberg tables with OpenSharing is now generally available. Providers can share Iceberg tables federated from foreign Iceberg catalogs using Lakehouse Federation, including to recipients using external Iceberg clients. See Add foreign Iceberg tables to a share for providers and Read data in a shared foreign Iceberg table for recipients.
Sharing foreign schemas and tables with OpenSharing is now generally available
September 11, 2026
Sharing and reading foreign schemas and foreign tables with OpenSharing is now generally available. Providers can share foreign schemas and tables federated from external data sources using Lakehouse Federation, without copying data into Databricks. See Add foreign schemas or tables to a share for providers and Read data in a shared foreign table or foreign schema for recipients.
Sharing foreign schemas and tables materializes data on the provider's side, which incurs compute and storage costs. See How do I incur and check OpenSharing costs?.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is now available on Unity Gateway
September 11, 2026
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is now available on Unity Gateway with text and image inputs. See supported regions. You can access this model using Foundation Model APIs.
Customers are responsible for ensuring their compliance with applicable terms.
Maintenance windows for continuous pipelines
September 10, 2026
You can now set a maintenance window on a continuous Lakeflow pipeline to control when Databricks applies platform updates that require a restart, such as new runtime versions and serverless infrastructure maintenance. Select a day of the week, a start hour, and a time zone, and Databricks starts maintenance only within that one-hour window. Configure the window in the Jobs UI, the Pipelines UI, or the Jobs REST API.
See Manage updates for continuous pipelines.
The Databricks Excel Add-in is now generally available
September 10, 2026
The Databricks Excel Add-in is now generally available. Connect Microsoft Excel to your Databricks workspace to browse and import governed Unity Catalog tables and views, run SQL queries, build pivot tables, use custom functions, and write data back to Unity Catalog. You can now also enable Live query when building pivot tables to see results as you update the fields.
See Connect to Databricks from Microsoft Excel.
External secrets in Unity Catalog (Beta)
September 9, 2026
External secrets connect a Unity Catalog schema to AWS Secrets Manager. The secrets appear in Unity Catalog as read-only securable objects that you govern with Unity Catalog privileges. Databricks reads their values from AWS Secrets Manager on demand. See External secrets in Unity Catalog.
Celigo connector (Beta)
September 9, 2026
The Celigo connector is now available in Lakeflow Connect in Beta. Workspace admins can control access to this feature from the Previews page.
The connector ingests audit log events, such as create, update, and delete operations on resources, from Celigo (integrator.io) into Databricks. Authentication uses a Celigo integrator.io API token.
See Celigo connector.
Anysphere Organization connector (Beta)
September 9, 2026
The Anysphere Organization connector is now available in Lakeflow Connect in Beta. Workspace admins can control access to this feature from the Previews page.
The connector uses the Anysphere (Cursor) Organization Admin API to ingest organization members, groups, and group members into Databricks as daily snapshots. Authentication uses a Cursor Organization Admin API key.
See Anysphere Organization connector.
Anaplan connector (Beta)
September 9, 2026
The Anaplan connector is now available in Lakeflow Connect in Beta. Workspace admins can control access to this feature from the Previews page.
The connector ingests audit trail events and user account records from your Anaplan tenant into Databricks. Authentication uses an Anaplan CA certificate and its paired private key.
See Anaplan connector.
time_bucket SQL function aligns timestamps to fixed-width time buckets
September 8, 2026
time_bucket returns the start of the fixed-width interval a timestamp falls into, aligned to an origin you choose (for example, 15-minute or 3-month buckets). Use it instead of date_trunc when the bucket width or start is not a calendar unit.
See time_bucket function.
Partner-powered AI features can no longer be disabled in the settings UI
September 8, 2026
You can no longer disable the partner-powered AI features setting in the account or workspace settings UI, but can still enable it. Until November 1, 2026, you can still use the Settings API to enable or disable the setting.
On November 1, 2026, the setting will be removed, and any change will then require contacting your Databricks account team.
ABAC DENY policies are in Beta
September 8, 2026
ABAC DENY policies are in Beta in Unity Catalog. DENY policies can be used to explicitly deny the MANAGE ACCESS CONTROL privilege to prevent specified principals, including object owners, from performing access-management operations. They always take precedence over any grant.
For details, see ABAC DENY policies (Beta).
Zerobus Ingest into default storage is now in Public Preview
September 7, 2026
Ingesting into tables backed by default storage with Zerobus Ingest in Lakeflow Connect is now in Public Preview. See Create or identify the target table.
See which chunks support each ai_search answer (Beta)
September 8, 2026
You can now turn on the generate_citations option in the ai_search function to see which retrieved chunks the model used to support each answer it generates. ai_search function
OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now available on Unity Gateway
September 4, 2026
OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now available on Unity Gateway for enterprise reasoning, structured document processing, coding, agentic search, multimodal inputs, and long-context workloads. You can access this model using Foundation Model APIs pay-per-token.
Customers are responsible for ensuring their compliance with applicable terms.
Share metric views with OpenSharing (Beta)
September 3, 2026
You can now share metric views with Databricks users in other metastores or accounts using OpenSharing. See Add metric views to a share and Read shared metric views.
Environment version 6 is now available
September 3, 2026
You can now select environment version 6 as your base environment for serverless and standard classic compute. See Environment version 6.
Git Folder Serverless is in Beta
September 2, 2026
You can now use Git Folder Serverless to share serverless compute and a pyproject.toml-managed environment across notebooks and files in a Git folder. See Git Folder Serverless.
Google Gemini 3.8 Flash now available as a Databricks-hosted model
September 2, 2026
Model Serving now supports Google Gemini 3.8 Flash as a Databricks-hosted model. You can access this model using Foundation Model APIs.
Customers are responsible for ensuring their compliance with applicable terms.
AI Search supports struct and map columns and filter-only queries
September 2, 2026
You can now index and filter struct and map columns in AI Search, and run filter-only queries that return rows matching a filter without vector or keyword retrieval. See Query an AI Search index.
Apache Arrow support for Zerobus Ingest is now generally available
September 1, 2026
Apache Arrow support for Zerobus Ingest in Lakeflow Connect is now generally available. See Use Arrow Flight with Zerobus Ingest.
Genie One web search is in Beta
September 1, 2026
Genie One can now search the public web to answer questions that need current information, such as recent release notes, third-party documentation, or news. Genie One cites the external sources it uses as links in its response. See Search the web.
Genie One and Genie Agents can now use models served through OpenAI on Databricks
September 1, 2026
Genie One and Genie Agents can now use models served through OpenAI on Databricks when partner-powered AI features are enabled. For the hosting provider used by each feature, see Hosting provider used when partner-powered AI features setting is enabled and disabled.
Genie Code scheduled tasks are now generally available
September 1, 2026
Genie Code scheduled tasks are now generally available. You can schedule Genie Code to run a prompt on a recurring schedule. Each run executes your prompt as a full Genie Code session and produces a continuable Genie chat with the results, so you can turn recurring analysis and other work into an unattended background task. Create a scheduled task by asking Genie Code in chat or from the Schedules menu. See Genie Code scheduled tasks.
Databricks Runtime maintenance updates (09/01)
September 1, 2026
New maintenance updates are available for supported Databricks Runtime versions. These updates include bug fixes, security patches, and performance improvements. For details, see:
- Databricks Runtime 18 LTS
- Databricks Runtime 18.2
- Databricks Runtime 18.1
- Databricks Runtime 17.3 LTS
- Databricks Runtime 16.4 LTS
- Databricks Runtime 15.4 LTS
- Databricks Runtime 14.3 LTS
- Databricks Runtime 13.3 LTS
Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 now available as a Databricks-hosted model
September 1, 2026
Unity Gateway now supports Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 as a Databricks-hosted model. You can access this model using Foundation Model APIs.
Customers are responsible for ensuring their compliance with applicable terms.
Automatic change data feed is now generally available
September 1, 2026
Automatic change data feed (Auto CDF) computes row-level changes at query time using row tracking, without requiring you to manually enable change data feed on each Delta Lake or Apache Iceberg v3 table. Auto CDF removes write-time overhead and makes MERGE and UPDATE operations about 15% faster on tables that you query for changes. It works with batch queries, Structured Streaming, and Delta Lake Sharing, and requires Databricks Runtime 19 LTS or above with row tracking enabled. See Automatic change data feed.