Using Serverless SQL

It would be remiss not to introduce the Serverless SQL offering in Databricks SQL. SQL Warehouses – the classic SQL Warehouses that we have discussed so far – reside in your cloud account. That is, the workers of the warehouses are VMs in your cloud account. This has two implications:

• You incur the cost of Databricks and the cost of the VMs that Databricks uses to power the SQL Warehouses.
• You incur some latency in cluster cold starts and upscaling events.

Databricks SQL offers Serverless SQL to circumvent this. In Serverless SQL, the SQL Warehouses are provisioned in Databricks’s account from a pool of pre-provisioned compute resources. This solves both the aforementioned implications:

• The cost of Databricks SQL Warehouses includes the VM costs, and you pay for only one line item
• Since Databricks uses a pool of pre-provisioned compute, no latency is incurred in cold starts, as well as when upscaling events
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