The starting point for a serverless notebook or job: an environment version plus ready-installed libraries. Options include Standard, ML, AI and workspace base environments that admins create.
Read more: Databricks docs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Base environment in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Serverless
Compute tier for single Azure SQL databases that scales automatically, pauses when idle and charges by the second. It is offered in General Purpose and Hyperscale, not Business Critical, and reserved capacity does not apply.
- Notebook
Combines runnable code cells, in Python, SQL, Scala or R, with their results in one interactive Azure Databricks document; it runs on attached compute, and a job can run it as a task.
- Job
A sequence of steps executed together on one agent or runner, or on the server for agentless work. While running, each occupies one of your parallel jobs.
- Environment version
A stable client API that fixes the Python version and packages for serverless code, leaving Databricks free to upgrade the server separately.
- Table options
Set only at creation with
OPTIONS, these key-value storage settings can't be altered or dropped afterwards; on Delta tables they also show up among the table properties. - Standard deployment type
A Foundry deployment type billed per token that keeps processing of prompts and responses inside the Azure geography of the resource, meeting data residency needs at lower volumes.
- Workspace
Teams in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric collaborate in this folder-style container, which groups items such as reports, semantic models and lakehouses, controls who can access them and is assigned a capacity.
- CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
Related terms
- Environments dependency mode
In Beta, classic compute using standard access can take its dependencies from a base environment. Docker, init scripts, cluster libraries and Spark environment variables can't be used alongside it.
- Notebook task
A job task whose work is a notebook. Under serverless compute it uses the base environment and dependencies set in that notebook unless told otherwise.