February 2025

These features and Databricks platform improvements were released in February 2025.

Note

Releases are staged. Your Databricks account might not be updated until a week or more after the initial release date.

Use service credentials for Unity Catalog-governed access to external cloud services

February 7, 2025

Service credentials enable simple and secure authentication with your Google Cloud services from Databricks. Service credentials are generally available and support both Python and Scala SDKs. This feature requires compute on Databricks Runtime 16.2 or above. See Manage access to external cloud services using service credentials.

Download as Excel is now supported in notebooks connected to SQL warehouses

February 6, 2025

For notebooks connected to SQL warehouses, you can now download cell results that contain tabular data as an Excel file. See Download results.

Write data from pipelines to external services with Delta Live Tables sinks (Public Preview)

February 5, 2025

The Delta Live Tables sink API is in Public Preview. With Delta Live Tables sinks, you can write data transformed by your pipeline to targets like event streaming services such as Apache Kafka or Azure Event Hubs, and external tables managed by Unity Catalog or the Hive metastore. See Stream records to external services with Delta Live Tables sinks.

Predictive optimization

February 4, 2025

Predictive optimization removes the need to manually manage maintenance operations for Delta tables. Maintenance operations are only run as necessary, eliminating both unnecessary runs for maintenance operations and burden associated with tracking and troubleshooting performance. See Predictive optimization for Unity Catalog managed tables.