Big shift coming for Azure Databricks users

Starting 30 September 2026, all new Azure Databricks workspaces will be Unity Catalog only.

- No DBFS root.
- No Hive Metastore.
- No legacy runtimes below 13.3 LTS.
- No “old way” of doing things.

Disabling DBFS root and DBFS mounts does not disable the dbfs: URI. The following continue to work as expected:

- Volumes remain accessible via the dbfs:/Volumes prefix, as well as the POSIX-style /Volumes path.

- System paths: dbfs:/databricks-datasets/, and other read-only data accessible via Databricks system paths, such as the MLflow resource paths, remain accessible.

- Internal workspace system data: This includes content generated automatically by Databricks, such as notebook revisions, job run details, command results, and Spark logs.