How to Determine if Materialized View is Performing Full or Incremental Refresh?

guiferviz
New Contributor III

I'm currently testing materialized views and I need some help understanding the refresh behavior. Specifically, I want to know if my materialized view is querying the full table (performing a full refresh) or just doing an incremental refresh.

From some tests I did on a medium-sized table (similar to the sample table created in this guide), I observed the following:

  • When I add new rows, the refresh takes about 10 seconds.
  • A full refresh takes about 1 minute.
  • When I delete some rows, the refresh also takes about 1 minute.

Based on these observations, I suppose that a delete operation triggers a full refresh. However, apart from the execution time, I have nothing else to validate my theory.

Does anyone have any tips or methods for identifying whether a materialized view is doing a full refresh or an incremental refresh in Databricks? Thanks!