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:

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

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