Hi All,

recently, while testing Fine-grained Access Control (FGAC) on dedicated compute, I came across something that seems a bit unusual, and I’d like to ask if anyone else has seen similar behavior.

I created a view with only one record, and had another user (who does not have access to the underlying table) run a simple SELECT query on it.

From the Query History, I can confirm that the query was indeed executed through FGAC.

However, when I checked the billing record in system.billing.usage, I noticed that this query only ran for 2.39 seconds, yet it consumed about 0.0811 DBU.

If we extrapolate that, it would be roughly 122 DBU per hour — which is almost equivalent to running a 2X-Large SQL Warehouse continuously.

What’s puzzling is that the time window between usage_start_time and usage_end_time is 10 minutes, even though the FGAC query itself only took 2.39 seconds to execute. 

So I’m wondering:

- Has anyone observed similar FGAC cost behavior on dedicated compute?

- Does Databricks charge in 10-minute minimum billing units for FGAC workloads?

- Is there a better way to accurately estimate the actual cost of an FGAC query?

Appreciate any insights or experiences you can share 

#FineGrainedAccessControl #CostOptimization