Azure Databricks Cost
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How To Calculate the Real Cost of Azure Databricks SQL Warehouse Instances

Guillermo Musumeci
9 min readJun 10, 2024

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In this story, we will learn how to calculate the cost of Azure Databricks SQL Warehouse instances.

A Databricks SQL Warehouse is a compute resource that lets us query and explore data on Azure Databricks.

At the moment of writing, Azure Databricks offers 3 types of SQL Warehouse:

  • SQL Warehouse Classic: the SQL Warehouse Classic compute layer exists in our Azure subscription account and supports Photon but not Predictive IO or Intelligent Workload Management.
  • SQL Warehouse Pro: the SQL Warehouse Pro compute layer exists in our Azure subscription account and supports Photon and Predictive IO but not Intelligent Workload Management.
  • SQL Warehouse Serverless: using the Azure Databricks serverless architecture, a Databricks SQL Warehouse Serverless supports all of the performance features of Databricks SQL (Photon, Predictive IO, and Intelligent Workload Management) and exists in our Azure Databricks account.

As we can see in the list above, the most significant difference between SQL Warehouse Classic and SQL Warehouse Pro is that the compute layer is in our Azure subscription account, and the SQL Warehouse Serverless is in our Azure Databricks account.

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Guillermo Musumeci

Certified AWS, Azure & GCP Architect | HashiCorp Ambassador | Terraform SME | KopiCloud Founder | ex-AWS | Entrepreneur | Book Author | Husband & Dad of ✌