JimmyEatBrick
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee

Databricks recommends to ALWAYS use Managed Tables always UNLESS:

  • Your tables are not Delta
  • You explicitly need to have the table files in a specific location

 

Managed Tables are just better... Databricks manages:

  • the upgrades (Deletion Vectors? Column Mapping? If they are managed, you will get that)
  • the layout (Optimal number of files, optimal clustering to accelerate queries... all with Predictive Optimization)
  • things like renaming a table, dropping and undropping
  • plus observability and other cool stats provided by UC

 

There should be NO need whatsoever for users to know WHERE the table data is stored, any operation dealing with a table should be done directly to the table elements through the Metastore and not to the files.