Unable to see the size of a materialized view in a declarative pipeline

Have the owner of the materialized view run the DESCRIBE command or if the owner is a service principal, impersonate it.

Written by Sahil Singh

Last published at: September 17th, 2025

Problem

The size of a materialized view in a declarative pipeline is not visible in the UI or when you execute commands like DESCRIBE TABLE EXTENDED, DESCRIBE DETAIL, DESCRIBE EXTENDED, or DESCRIBE FORMATTED to try to retrieve size details. The output does not display size information. 

 

Example query

%sql
describe extended <materialized-view-name>

 

Cause

You are viewing the UI or running a DESCRIBE query as a non-owner of the materialized view. Size is not displayed for non-owners. This is expected behavior regarding ownership rules.

 

Solution

Ask the owner of the materialized view to execute the DESCRIBE EXTENDED command to retrieve the size. This is a strict requirement. Users with ALL PRIVILEGES cannot see materialized view size either. 

 

Alternatively, if the owner is a service principal, impersonate the service principal and execute the DESCRIBE command using a job.

 

To determine the materialized view owner, refer to the “Describe a materialized view” section of the Configure materialized views in Databricks SQL (AWS | Azure | GCP) documentation.