anuj_lathi
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee

Hi — you're right that these Databricks-specific rule codes (DB01, DB03, etc.) are not documented anywhere publicly. The notebook editor docs only mention them as a configuration example without explaining what each rule checks.

What We Know

The DB* rules are Databricks-written diagnostics layered on top of the standard linters (Ruff, Pylint, Pyright, Flake8). They cover Databricks-specific patterns — things like PySpark API usage, dbutils calls, or notebook-specific syntax that standard linters wouldn't catch. But there's no public rule index like Ruff or Pylint provide.

How to Identify Which Rule Is Firing

When you see a highlighted error in the notebook editor, hover over the squiggly underline — the tooltip should show the rule code (e.g., DB01) and a short description. This is currently the only way to map a code to its meaning.

You can then selectively disable it:

# pyproject.toml (place in your notebook's ancestor path or ~/home)

[tool.databricks]

disabled_rules = ['DB01']

 

If You Want to Disable Broader Categories

You can also toggle the three highlighting categories independently via Settings → Developer:

  • Python syntax error highlighting — core syntax errors (red)
  • Python format error highlighting — formatting issues like line length (yellow/red, experimental)
  • Python type error highlighting — type checking like missing args, wrong types (DBR 16.0+, experimental)

If the specific errors you want to suppress fall under formatting or type checking, toggling those off may be simpler than hunting individual rule codes.

Requesting Better Documentation

I'd suggest filing a docs feedback request via the "Was this page helpful?" widget on the notebook editor docs page — asking for a rule reference table would be a reasonable ask.

Docs:

Anuj Lathi
Solutions Engineer @ Databricks