Dropped Your Table in Databricks? Here’s How Delta Lake Can Save You

Mistakes happen.
In the fast-paced world of data engineering, it’s terrifyingly easy to run a DROP TABLE command accidentally and panic as your hard-earned data seems to vanish.

But if you’re using Delta Lake on Databricks, don’t worry — you’re not out of luck.

Delta Lake’s time travel and transaction log features are built to save you from disasters like this.

Let’s walk through how to recover a dropped table.

The Problem: Accidental Drop

DROP TABLE sales_data;

Maybe you meant to drop a temp table, or you thought you were in your dev environment. Now your production table is gone. Or is it?

Delta Lake to the Rescue
If your table were a Delta table, it’s not gone! Delta Lake automatically keeps a transaction log (_delta_log) behind the scenes.
This means you can travel back in time to previous versions, including the version before the table was dropped.

Here’s how you can bring your table back

In case metastore is HiveMetastore

--List down the list of tables
DESCRIBE HISTORY sales_data;

--Restore table using logs timestamp…