I created my own Databricks workspace via Azure Portal. The benefit of using it via cloud provider is almost all feature s are available compared to the free version in my observation. I am right now exploring Lakebase. I would suggest go with a single node cluster to begin with via the compute option in the left pane menu. For me, creating unity catalog meta-store took some time as I had to be the admin first to create meta-store, then attaching it to the workspace where I am operating from. But once that's done, you can simply upload a file to the volumes in UC and start exploring it via Notebook.