Secrets Redaction seems to work only when the retrieved value is assigned to a varible

irfanghat — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 10:40:31 GMT

I randomly encountered the following behavior when setting up Big Query federation in Databricks Free Edition and wondered if this is expected behavior or just something that happens in the

Executing cell 1 as captured in the screenshot prints out the secret value, however, assigning it to a variable prints [REDACTED]

Re: Secrets Redaction seems to work only when the retrieved value is assigned to a varible

tom_n — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:42:08 GMT

hi, this is expected behaviour and is not specific to Free Edition. Databricks documents that a secret assigned through dbutils.secrets.get() and subsequently printed should be replaced with [REDACTED]. Redaction is best-effort and applies to literal secret values; it does not protect against deliberate or indirect transformations. Consequently, users should never rely on redaction alone and should use appropriate access controls.

Reference: Secret management > Secret redaction

topic Re: Secrets Redaction seems to work only when the retrieved value is assigned to a varible in Data Engineering

Secrets Redaction seems to work only when the retrieved value is assigned to a varible

Re: Secrets Redaction seems to work only when the retrieved value is assigned to a varible