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9. Query and explore

You'll run interactive SQL against your lakehouse tables in the Databricks SQL Editor in ~5 min.

Prereqs: Automation & Orchestration

Why this matters​

Once a pipeline writes data, someone has to look at it. You check that the transforms did what you meant, eyeball a few distributions, and answer the one-off question your stakeholder just asked. The SQL Editor plus a serverless warehouse gives you a place to do that. No cluster to size, no waiting on startup. You open the editor and run a query against any table your Unity Catalog grants let you see.

Journey checklist​

  • Get started.
  • Before you start.
  • Infra setup.
  • Cost monitoring.
  • Data Governance Strategy.
  • Access your data.
  • Build the first pipeline.
  • Automation and orchestration.
  • Query and explore.
  • Databricks AI/BI.
  • Business semantics.

Run your first query​

  1. Open the SQL Editor from the left nav. Every workspace ships with a Starter Serverless Warehouse, a managed endpoint built for interactive SQL, so you do not have to create compute first.
  2. Pick the Starter Serverless Warehouse in the warehouse dropdown if it is not already selected.
  3. Set the catalog and schema in the context bar so you can use plain table names instead of catalog.schema.table everywhere.
  4. Type a query and run it. The warehouse spins up in a few seconds and returns results in the grid below.
tip

Drag a table from the schema browser straight into the editor and it drops in the fully qualified name for you.

Video walkthrough​

Where people trip​

  • Reaching for a pro warehouse out of habit. Serverless starts faster and scales on its own, so use it for interactive work unless your admin set up a specific warehouse for your team.
  • Querying with no context set. If you skip the catalog and schema in the context bar, every query needs the full three-part name (catalog.schema.table). Set it once and the editor fills in the rest.

Next​

PageWhat you'll do
DashboardsCreate and share visual reports backed by governed lakehouse tables.
Genie SpacesLet business users ask data questions in natural language.
Databricks AppsBuild and deploy custom web applications on Databricks.