Introduction to Databricks Workspace
Estimated read: 8 min
You’ve created a workspace in the previous section (Free Edition or AWS-based). This lecture is a tour of what’s actually inside it – the browser-based environment where every notebook, cluster, job, and catalog object you touch for the rest of this guide lives.
The workspace sidebar
The left-hand sidebar is your primary navigation, organized roughly the way a warehouse client’s object browser was, but spanning far more than tables:
- Workspace – your folder tree of notebooks, files, and Git folders (covered in depth later in this section).
- Catalog – the Unity Catalog browser: catalogs, schemas, tables, and volumes, with a built-in data preview, comparable to expanding a schema in a SQL client but with lineage and permissions visible inline.
- Workflows – where Lakeflow Jobs live, covered in Section 10.
- Compute – cluster management, covered later in this section.
- SQL – SQL editor, dashboards, and (on paid tiers) SQL warehouses, a dedicated compute type optimized for BI-style queries rather than general Spark workloads.
Folders, permissions, and organization
Workspace folders behave like a filesystem with access control lists attached at any level – a folder can be shared with a specific user, a group, or made workspace-wide, and permissions inherit downward unless explicitly overridden. This is a finer-grained model than a typical warehouse’s schema-level GRANT, closer to how a modern source control system scopes repository access.
Key term: a workspace is the single Databricks deployment you’re inside right now – not to be confused with an account (which can contain multiple workspaces, e.g. dev/uat/prod) or a metastore (the Unity Catalog layer that can span multiple workspaces). You’ll see all three terms used precisely and distinctly throughout this guide.
The top bar and search
The top bar surfaces global search (across notebooks, tables, and jobs – genuinely useful once a workspace has hundreds of objects), your user settings (workspace and editor themes, covered when you created your Free Edition account), and, on multi-workspace accounts, a workspace switcher.
Where you’ll actually spend your time
For the rest of Part 1, expect to move between three places repeatedly: the notebook editor (next lecture), the Catalog browser (once Unity Catalog is introduced in Section 6), and Workflows (Section 10). Everything else in the sidebar becomes relevant progressively as this guide covers it – you don’t need to understand the whole interface before writing your first line of code.
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