I recently ran into an interesting Databricks behavior while implementing a row-count comparison using Delta Time Travel (VERSION AS OF).

Platform: Azure
Scenario:

• Same Unity Catalog
• Same fully qualified table
• Same table ID, location, and Delta format

Yet the behavior differed across environments.

What worked in Dev

• I ran the notebook interactively
• Using an all-purpose cluster
• Delta Time Travel (VERSION AS OF) worked as expected

What failed in Prod

• The same notebook ran as a scheduled Job
• Executed on a job cluster on prod workspace with scheduled job that has one task with a notebook
• The exact same Delta table failed with:

TIME TRAVEL is not allowed. Operation not supported on Streaming Tables

The surprising part 

The table itself was unchanged:

• Same catalog
• Same location
• Same Delta properties
• Same table ID

My code compares active row counts between the last two Delta versions of a table, and fails if the row count drops more than 15%, using Delta time travel (VERSION AS OF) to read past snapshots.