Transactions

Transactions is a Databricks data engineering capability, introduced March 2026.

Multi-statement, multi-table ACID transactions on Unity Catalog managed tables, grouped with BEGIN ATOMIC ... END or BEGIN TRANSACTION ... COMMIT so every change commits together or rolls back together.

• It brings plain BEGIN and COMMIT to the lakehouse, and the docs reach for the oldest example in the database textbook: debit one account, credit another, write an audit row, all or nothing. 🔗
• Only half of it is finished: writes to managed Delta tables went generally available while writes to managed Iceberg tables stayed in Private Preview, joinable only by filling in an enrollment form. 🔗
• Every participating table needs catalog commits switched on, which promotes Unity Catalog to the table's system of coordination, brokering state across engines. 🔗

⚠ Limitations: Writes to Unity Catalog managed Iceberg tables are still Private Preview. Every table written to must be a Unity Catalog managed table with catalog commits enabled; non-interactive transactions need a SQL warehouse, serverless, or Databricks Runtime 18.0+, interactive transactions need a SQL warehouse, and transactions over OpenSharing shared assets need Databricks Runtime 18.1+. 🔗

Category

Data engineering

Introduced

March 2026🔗

Also known as

Multi-table transactions, multi-statement transactions, BEGIN ATOMIC

Verified

2026-08-03