Databricks Unit (DBU)
Catalog row in Vendor License Metrics · Cited
- Unit
- DBU
- Aliases
- DBU; DBUs
- Definition
- Pricing FAQ: "A Databricks Unit (DBU) is a normalized unit of processing power on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform used for measurement and pricing purposes." The number of DBUs a workload consumes is driven by processing metrics, which may include the compute resources used and the amount of data processed.
- Counting rules
- DBUs are metered per second ("Only pay for the products you use at per second granularity") and charged at the per-DBU List Price of the SKU, which depends on workload type (Jobs, All-Purpose, SQL, Pipelines, serverless), platform tier (Premium or Enterprise), cloud and region. Classic compute DBU rates depend on the instance type; Photon raises the DBU emission rate of classic clusters (2.9X for Jobs and Pipelines, 2X for All-Purpose per the product pages). On classic compute the cloud provider bills the virtual machines separately; serverless DBU prices include the underlying compute. Usage is recorded in system.billing.usage with usage_unit DBU.
- Floors / minimums
- No floor for classic compute. Serverless compute is billed with a one-minute minimum (Lakeflow Jobs pricing FAQ).
- Applies to products
- Lakeflow Jobs
- Lakeflow Pipelines
- Databricks SQL
- All-Purpose Compute
- Serverless compute
- Model Serving
- Databricks Managed Services
- Related metrics