Databricks: Navigating the Workspace

A workspace is an environment for accessing all of your Databricks assets. A workspace organizes objects (notebooks, libraries, dashboards, and experiments) into folders and provides access to data objects and computational resources.

The workspace organizes objects such as notebooks, libraries, experiments, queries, and dashboards into folders, and provides access to data and computational resources such as clusters and jobs. You can manage the workspace using the workspace UI, the Databricks CLI setup & documentation, and the Databricks REST API reference. 

This article walks you through the Databricks workspace, an environment for accessing all of your Databricks assets.

Objects in Databricks Workspace

Notebook

A web-based interface to documents that contain runnable commands, visualizations, and narrative text. Notebooks are one mechanism for running code in Databricks. The other mechanism is jobs.

Jobs

Jobs are one mechanism for running code in Databricks. 

Library

A package of code available to the notebook or job running on your cluster. Databricks runtimes include many libraries and you can add your own. A library makes third-party or locally-built code available to notebooks and jobs running on your clusters.

Repos

Repos are Databricks folders whose contents are co-versioned together by syncing them to a remote Git repository. Using a Databricks repo, you can develop notebooks in Databricks and use a remote Git repository for collaboration and version control.

Models

Model refers to a model registered in MLflow Model Registry. Model Registry is a centralized model store that enables you to manage the full lifecycle of MLflow models. It provides chronological model lineage, model versioning, stage transitions, and model and model version annotations and descriptions.

Experiment

A collection of MLflow runs for training a machine learning model. Each experiment lets you visualize, search, and compare runs, as well as download run artifacts or metadata for analysis in other tools.

Queries

Queries are SQL statements that allow you to interact with your data. 

Dashboards

Dashboards are presentations of query visualizations and commentary. 

Alerts

Alerts are notifications that a field returned by a query has reached a threshold. 

Sidebar

You can access all of your Databricks assets using the sidebar. The sidebar’s contents depend on the selected persona: Data Science & Engineering, Machine Learning, or SQL.

By default, the sidebar appears in a collapsed state and only the icons are visible. Move your cursor over the sidebar to expand to the full view.

To change the persona, click the icon below the Databricks logo Databricks logo, and select a persona.

To pin a persona so that it appears the next time you log in, click pin persona next to the persona. Click it again to remove the pin.

Access the search dialog

To search the workspace, do the following:

1. Click the Search field in the top bar of the Databricks workspace or use the keyboard shortcut Command-P.
2. Your recent files, notebooks, queries, alerts, and dashboards are listed under Recents, sorted by the last opened date.
3. Enter your search criteria.
4. Recent objects in the list are filtered to match your search criteria.
5. Select an item from the list, or press Enter to display the search dialog.

You can search by text string, by object type, or both. After you type your search criteria and press Enter, the system searches the names of all queries, dashboards, alerts, files, folders, notebooks, libraries, and repos in the workspace that you have access to. If your workspace is enabled for Unity Catalog, the system also searches table names, table comments, column names, and column comments.

When you click an item in the search results, the item automatically opens in the appropriate persona-based environment. For example, when you click a query, it opens in Databricks SQL.

Search by text string

To search for a text string, type the string into the search field and then press Enter. The system searches the names of all objects in the workspace that you have access to. It also searches text in notebook commands, but not in non-notebook files.

Limit search to a specific object type

You can also search for items by type (file, folder, notebooks, libraries, table, or repo). A text string is not required. To limit your search to a specific type of item, click the corresponding tab in the Search dialog. If you leave the text field blank and then press Enter, the system searches for all objects of that type. Click a name from the list to open that item in the workspace. You can also use the dropdown menus to search for items by owner or by the last modified date.