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.

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.

Column

Type

Description

format

string

Format of the table, that is, delta.

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 the files in the latest version of the table.

sizeInBytes

int

The 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.

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