Centralized Location of Table History/Timestamps in Unity Catalog

[Eric_Kieft]

Is there a centralized location in Unity Catalog that retains the table history, specifically the last timestamp, for managed delta tables?

DESCRIBE HISTORY will provide it for a specific table, but I would like to get it for a number of tables.

information_schema.tables contains last_altered, however this appears to be intended for tracking changes to the table structure itself and does not change with all updates, such as inserts.

[noorbasha534]

exactly I was looking for the same. Snowflake provides 'last update' column which doesn't include DDL operations. Also, if Databricks provides such a column, it needs to be ensured that not just DDL, maintenance operations (VACUUM, OPTIMIZE etc) are excluded....

[noorbasha534]

someone from observability team of Databricks can pitch in here. We have a need to display all stale tables based on such a date column.

[Brahmareddy]

Hi Eric_Kieft,

How are you doing today?, As per my understanding, yeah, Unity Catalog doesn’t currently provide a direct system table that tracks all table modifications (including inserts/updates) across multiple managed Delta tables. DESCRIBE HISTORY works per table, but for multiple tables, you'd need a workaround.

A good approach is to use system tables in Unity Catalog, specifically system.access.table_changes or system.access.audit_logs, to track changes at a broader level. Alternatively, if you need a quick way to get the last modified timestamp for multiple tables, you could query Delta’s transaction logs stored in _delta_log or create a metadata tracking table that captures the latest DESCRIBE HISTORY result for all tables.

If this is something you need regularly, you could automate it by running a scheduled job that collects DESCRIBE HISTORY timestamps for all tables and stores them in a central table for easy querying.

Regards,

Brahma