Databricks Field Guide by TechFabric

Start using the Field Guide immediately. Call this for 'help me learn Databricks', 'try the Field Guide', or to begin certification prep. No arguments starts a Unity Catalog diagnostic. A topic opens its concept or chapter quiz; goal certification with an exam opens a covered domain's practice and flashcards, with official sources and honest gaps. An MCP Apps host opens the interactive card first;

Search the guide's chapters, margin notes and events for a Databricks question. Returns the best sections first, each with a snippet, its URL with the section anchor, and when the page last changed. Read one in full with get_chapter (pass the URL, or the slug and the anchor).

One chapter (or margin note) of the guide as clean Markdown with its code blocks intact, or one section of it: with its outline, its code blocks listed separately, its FAQs, when it last changed, and the official docs.databricks.com links it cites for the authoritative detail.

The SQL, Python, CLI and config blocks in the guide that match a topic, each with the explanation around it, the section it is from (URL with anchor), and the docs links that section cites. Runnable context for a coding agent; check the linked Databricks docs for current syntax.

Recent Databricks changes the guide tracks, newest first: margin notes (dated news with our position), release-stage changes from the feature register (with links to Databricks' documentation and release note), and chapters updated. Defaults to the last 30 days.

Every chapter in the guide's order, with its part, summary, dates, URL, Markdown URL and its main sections; and the margin notes.

Check one file of SQL, Python (PySpark, a notebook's source) or YAML (a Databricks Asset Bundle, job, cluster or warehouse config) against the Field Guide's own best-practice rules, deterministically: partitioning where the guide would cluster, secrets and storage paths written into code, grants to people rather than groups, environments in table names, jobs on all-purpose clusters or without time

Estimate a Databricks workload's monthly cost from the figures the Field Guide states (list prices per DBU by compute type, DBUs an hour by SQL warehouse size and classic instance type, model serving prices for pay-per-token, provisioned throughput, GPU and CPU serving, Apps and Genie rates, the Lakebase floor, storage), as a range with its assumptions, and the price per unit under unit_prices. Ev

Interactive: explains one Databricks concept step by step from the Field Guide's chapters: delta-transaction-log, liquid-clustering-vs-zorder, spark-shuffle-and-stages, unity-catalog-privilege-inheritance, photon-vs-classic-cost, cluster-autoscaling, streaming-watermarks, medallion-layers, lakebase-branching, serverless-vs-classic, mlflow-model-lifecycle. Call it first when the user asks "how does

Interactive: quizzes the reader. Call it when the user says "quiz me on Unity Catalog", "test me on Lakebase" or "check what I know about the Delta log". Five to eight multiple-choice questions on a chapter of the Field Guide, one section of it, or the whole guide, built deterministically from the guide's own tables, question-headed sections, FAQs and glossary: every question and every option is a

Interactive: a curated learning path through the Field Guide, by role or goal (data-engineer-fundamentals, analytics-engineer, ml-engineer, platform-admin, snowflake-to-databricks, cost-control): its steps in order (a section to read, a concept to explore, a quiz), each with the call that opens it. Call it when the user asks "where do I start with Databricks", "a learning path for an analytics eng

Interactive: certification prep for Databricks' exams (data-engineer-associate, data-engineer-professional, data-analyst-associate, machine-learning-associate, machine-learning-professional, genai-engineer-associate, context-engineer-associate, apache-spark-developer-associate): each domain with its weight as Databricks publishes it, the guide sections and concepts that bear on it, how much the gu

Interactive: flashcards for a Databricks exam domain (data-engineer-associate, data-engineer-professional, data-analyst-associate, machine-learning-associate, machine-learning-professional, genai-engineer-associate, context-engineer-associate, apache-spark-developer-associate; exam_prep lists the domains) or a chapter, built deterministically from the Field Guide: glossary terms, FAQs and each map

Interactive: draws your answer as a card the reader can use, from an A2UI v0.9.1 document you write: a comparison of options with a verdict, a plan as steps or a timeline, a cost or sizing calculator with sliders and a chart that follows them, a quiz or flashcards, a table, a Mermaid diagram. Call it whenever the answer has a shape: the reader asks to compare ("compare", "X vs Y", "pros and cons",

Interactive: walks a Databricks decision one question at a time (which-compute, serverless-or-classic, lakebase-or-delta, genie-or-dashboard, streaming-or-batch): every answer rests on the guide's own sentences, verbatim, with the section to read. Call it when the user asks "should I use serverless or classic", "Lakebase or Delta?", "Genie or a dashboard?" or "which compute for this job". The text

Interactive: a chapter's own diagrams, played step by step: each flowchart edge or sequence message in order, each node linking the section of the chapter it is about. Call it when the user says "show me the diagram for Lakebase branching" or "walk me through the medallion diagram". The text lists every diagram's nodes, its edges in order and its Mermaid source, so a terminal can draw it.