00 · Day Zero: Account, Workspace & CLI

Find the Signal. Act with Intelligence. · Databricks Module · Week 21, Day 0

This file is your first two hours on Databricks. By the end you will have: a free-trial account, a mental model of the workspace UI, the Databricks CLI authenticated with OAuth U2M, a working first notebook, a file uploaded to a volume, and a checklist to prove it all works. Everything else in this module builds on these muscles.

The running case study is ZoroLogistics, a fictional freight company. Day 0 is about getting the platform ready; Day 1 (file 01) starts building the lakehouse for it.

By the end of Day 0 you will be able to:

• Name the two planes (control vs. compute) and the two URL spaces (workspace vs. account).
• Install and authenticate the CLI with OAuth U2M, and switch profiles.
• Run a Python and a SQL cell in one notebook on serverless compute.
• Create a catalog/schema/volume and upload a file two different ways.
• Explain, in one sentence, how catalog.schema.table will govern everything that follows.
• State the day-zero cost reflex: "turn the meter off when idle" (file 17 makes it precise).

⚠️ Verify against live docs. Trial offers, free credits, UI labels, and CLI command names change. Re-check the links in Sources if a button or flag isn't where this file says it is.

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1. Create the account (free trial)

Databricks offers a free trial with a credit that covers serverless SQL and notebooks, enough for the entire first week. There is no credit card required for the trial tier in most regions; you will be asked to sign in with or create a cloud identity.

Steps (conceptual: follow the live flow):

1. Go to databricks.com and choose Try Databricks free / Start for free.
2. Pick your cloud (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and region. Any works; if you are in Zorost's Databricks Modernization Practice mindset, pick the cloud your clients actually use, the concepts are cloud-portable.
3. Authenticate with your cloud account (this links Databricks to your cloud subscription for classic compute and storage).
4. Wait for the workspace to provision. You land in the workspace home screen.

You now have a Databricks account (the top-level entity) containing one workspace (a single deployment). Bookmark both URLs:

Thing	URL	What it's for