System tables

System tables is a Databricks data governance capability, introduced June 2023.

A Databricks-hosted analytical store of an account's own operational data - billing, access, compute, lineage and more - exposed as read-only Unity Catalog tables in the system catalog.

• Your own platform becomes a dataset you can join: the billing, audit and lineage data behind the console arrives as ordinary tables you query with SQL. 🔗
• They are read-only, so this is the rare Unity Catalog schema where your write privileges mean nothing at all. 🔗
• The platform went generally available before most of its own tables did - the September 2024 GA covered the system tables platform plus exactly two billing tables. 🔗

⚠ Limitations: Read-only and unmodifiable, they must be enabled from a Unity Catalog-enabled workspace before anything appears, and free retention varies per table rather than being one number. 🔗

Category

Data governance

Introduced

June 2023🔗

Also known as

system catalog, system.billing

Verified

2026-08-20