Automatic Liquid Clustering and PO

lucami
Contributor

‎06-10-2025 02:26 AM

I spent some time to understand how to use automatic liquid clustering with dlt pipelines. Hope this can help you as well.

  1. Enable Predictive Optimization 
  2. Use this code:
# Enabling Automatic Liquid Clustering on a new table
@dlt.table(cluster_by_auto=True)
def tbl_with_auto():
   return spark.range(5)

# Manually choosing a clustering key initially, followed by automatic clustering
@dlt.table(cluster_by_auto=True, cluster_by=["id"])
def tbl_with_auto_and_initial_hint():
   return spark.range(5)

or in SQL

CREATE OR REPLACE MATERIALIZED VIEW mat_view_name
CLUSTER BY AUTO
AS SELECT * FROM source_table;

If you know how to specify initial clustering key with Spark SQL, let me know 🙂 .

Addy0_
Databricks Partner

‎06-10-2025 04:30 AM

Thank you for sharing this!

Just to add:
To enable automatic liquid clustering & set clustering columns for an existing table

ALTER TABLE table_name CLUSTER BY (column1, column2) AUTO;

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lucami
Contributor

‎06-10-2025 04:51 AM

Hi @Addy0_, thanks for sharing how to set it for existing table. Unfortunately, I think ALTER cannot be used with materialized view and streaming tables defined in dlt pipelines.

I was looking for something similar to 

@dlt.table(cluster_by_auto=True, cluster_by=["id"])

that in sql would look like

CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW tbl_with_auto_and_initial_hint
CLUSTER BY id AUTO AS
SELECT
    id,
    fare_amount
FROM source_table;

 But this code raises syntax error.

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