Delta Shared catalog use cost allocation

PumpItUpper — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:00:37 GMT

Hi. I have the following scenario on AWS Databricks:

I have a catalog that I need to Delta Share to external systems (both other dbks accounts and other non-dbks systems).
All tables on this catalog are MANAGED type, with all the files sitting in the same S3 bucket.
This catalog sees really heavy use internally (inside our dbks account), and we expect heavy external use as well once we start sharing it.

My worry:
I understand that Delta Share doesn't incur extra cost on itself, but the queries from external systems against this catalog will trigger the GetObject action on the underlying bucket. Also, there will be network egress costs for each query.
How can I attribute the cost for the use of this catalog? I need to know which is internal use, and be able to identify each of the external systems individually so I can chargeback to the respective teams.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Delta Shared catalog use cost allocation

emma_s — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:20:16 GMT

As you've rightly said the cost of delta sharing is not in the compute but in the egress costs. I would also ignore the GetObject costs as these again will probably be negligible, around $0.0004 per 1000 get object requests.

So the egress charges is where you may need a solution. Has this been rolled out yet? and do you have a concept of the scale of the likely egress bill. Again you have a certain amount of egress for free, so it may be worth monitoring to see if it's actually a sizeable amount. Remember you'll only be paying egress if it's to a different cloud/region. if you do need to so this I think you would look to query the system audit table for query numbers by user by table. I would then create a reference table of all the relative table sizes in my catalog and use this to apportion costs.

Query to get to how many times a user has used the delta share

SELECT event_time, event_date, action_name, user_identity.email AS recipient_email, source_ip_address, request_params['share'] AS share_name, request_params['schema'] AS schema_name, request_params['name'] AS table_name, response.status_code AS status_code, response.error_message AS error_message FROM system.access.audit WHERE action_name LIKE 'deltaSharing%' -- Uncomment and set a share name to filter to a specific share: -- AND request_params['share'] = '<your_share_name>' AND event_date >= current_date() - INTERVAL 30 DAYS ORDER BY event_time DESC

The following is a reference of the actions:

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Emma

topic Delta Shared catalog use cost allocation in Databricks Free Edition Help

Delta Shared catalog use cost allocation

Re: Delta Shared catalog use cost allocation