Databricks Release Notes

The Activity details toggle in the SQL warehouse monitoring UI is now generally available. View color-coded annotations on the Running clusters chart that explain why a warehouse remains active, including query activity, fetching queries, open sessions, and idle states. Hover over bars to see metadata, or click on fetching activity to filter the query history table. See Activity details.

Databricks-provided MCP Services for SaaS applications such as Slack, GitHub, Atlassian, and Google Drive will soon be generally available, with both read and write operations enabled by default. Admins and users can disable MCP Services and individual tools in Unity Gateway.

See MCPs.

To deliver Postgres version updates, security patches, and new features to your projects sooner, Lakebase has shortened the planned update notification window. Planned updates are now posted at least 3 days in advance, rather than 7. You can check your project's settings for upcoming updates.

See Manage updates.

You can now store, govern, and access secrets as securable objects in Unity Catalog. A Unity Catalog secret uses the three-level namespace (catalog.schema.secret) and is governed by Unity Catalog privileges, so you can apply the same access controls and auditing that you use for other data assets. See Secrets in Unity Catalog.

The Lakeflow Pipelines Editor has been generally available since May 2026. In August, it will become the default editor for developing and debugging pipelines in workspaces with the compliance security profile enabled. At that time the legacy editor will be removed.

For more information about the Lakeflow Pipelines Editor, see Develop and debug ETL pipelines with the Lakeflow Pipelines Editor. If you have questions about this transition, contact your account team.

You can now configure front-end Private Link for account-level Genie One. Turn on the Front-end Private Link for Custom URLs and Account preview to get started. See Configure inbound Private Link for account-level resources.

The Strac connector is now available in Lakeflow Connect in Beta. Workspace admins can control access to this feature from the Previews page.

The connector ingests data-security audit events from your Strac instance into Databricks. Authentication uses a Strac API key.

See Strac connector.

For custom model serving endpoints with a tensor-based input signature, you can now send the request body as a serialized KServe v2 ModelInferRequest with Content-Type: application/x-protobuf, instead of JSON.

This feature is in Public Preview and is only available on endpoints deployed after July 9, 2026. See Protobuf tensor input.

Model Serving now supports OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT-5.6 Luna as Databricks-hosted models. You can access these models using Foundation Model APIs pay-per-token.

Customers are responsible for ensuring their compliance with applicable terms.

Databricks SQL alerts now support all compliance security profile standards that Databricks supports, and are available by default for workspaces with the compliance security profile enabled.

Use Databricks SQL alerts to monitor data and KPIs by running queries on a schedule, evaluating conditions, and notifying recipients when the conditions are met.

See Databricks SQL alerts.

The _object_metadata column is now in Public Preview. The _object_metadata column is a hidden metadata column that exposes object-level properties for objects in cloud storage, including MIME type, ETag, user-defined key-value metadata, system-defined metadata, and object tags. It is available starting from Databricks Runtime 18.1.

See Object metadata column.

Model Serving now supports GLM 5.2 as a Databricks-hosted model. This mixture of experts (MoE) model supports a 1 million token context window and is optimized for long-horizon reasoning, coding, and agentic tool use. You can access this model using Foundation Model APIs.

Customers are responsible for ensuring their compliance with applicable terms.

Genie Spaces are now called Genie Agents. The name changed across the documentation, but the product's capabilities are unchanged. For more information, see Genie Agents.

Google Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemini 2.5 Pro will be retired on October 2, 2026. The recommended replacement models are Gemini 3.1 Pro or Gemini 3.5 Flash. See Deprecated and retired models for migration guidance.

Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 will be retired on October 9, 2026. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the recommended replacement. See Deprecated and retired models for migration guidance.

You can now use Unity Catalog permissions to restrict which task-specific AI Functions your organization can access, independent of foundation model access. Contact your account team to enable this feature. See AI Functions Unity Catalog permissions.

REPLACE WHERE flows for pipelines and standalone streaming tables are now generally available. Use them to replace only rows matching a predicate on each refresh, without reprocessing the full table history. See Batch processing with REPLACE WHERE flows.