Welcome to Databricks, and a great choice for starting your Data Engineering journey!

 

The short answer is that Databricks Free Edition is forever free. There is no trial period or expiration date. You can use it indefinitely as long as you stay within the daily usage limits set by the fair usage policy. 

 

There are a couple of things worth knowing. If you exceed your daily quota, compute resources get shut down for the rest of the day (or in extreme cases, the rest of the month), but your data and settings stay intact, and you can pick up again once the limit resets. Also, Databricks may delete accounts that remain inactive for an extended period, so try to log in periodically to keep your account active. 

 

Free Edition does come with some resource limitations compared to the full platform (serverless-only compute, one SQL warehouse, max 5 concurrent job tasks, etc.), but for learning Data Engineering concepts, it covers a lot of ground. You can build and test data pipelines with Lakeflow, run notebooks, write SQL queries, and create dashboards.

 

Happy learning!

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