Delta Live Tables Limitations

The following are limitations of Delta Live Tables that are important to know as you develop your pipelines:

  • A Databricks workspace is limited to 100 concurrent pipeline updates.

  • Delta Live Tables datasets can be defined only once. Because of this, they can be the target of only a single operation in all Delta Live Tables pipelines. The exception is streaming tables with append flow processing, which allows you to write to the streaming table from multiple streaming sources. See Use append flow to write to a streaming table from multiple source streams.

  • Identity columns have the following limitations. To learn more about identity columns in Delta tables, see Use identity columns in Delta Lake.

    • Identity columns are not supported with tables that are the target of APPLY CHANGES processing.

    • Identity columns might be recomputed during updates to a materialized views. Because of this, Databricks recommends using identity columns in Delta Live Tables only with streaming tables.

  • A pipeline can define materialized views and streaming tables in only a single catalog and schema.

  • Datasets created in a Delta Live Tables pipeline are written only to Delta Lake. You cannot output data from a pipeline to non-Delta Lake sinks.

  • Materialized views and streaming tables created by a Delta Live Tables pipeline can be accessed only by Databricks interfaces.

  • You cannot use Delta Sharing to share materialized views and streaming tables created by a Delta Live Tables pipeline.

  • There are limitations for the Databricks compute required to run and query Unity Catalog pipelines. See the Requirements for pipelines that publish to Unity Catalog.

  • Only the pipeline owner can access the event log for a pipeline. See Querying the event log.

  • Delta Lake time travel queries are supported only with Streaming tables, and are not supported with materialized views. See Work with Delta Lake table history.

  • You cannot enable Iceberg reads on materialized views and streaming tables created by Delta Live Tables pipelines.

  • Table and column tags are not supported for materialized views and streaming tables.