How Photon Actually Works Under the Hood
The four workloads where its premium buys you nothing
Every Databricks engineer has flipped Photon on, watched a job get faster, and quietly accepted it as free magic. Then the bill arrived with a bigger number, and a different job that looked identical got no faster at all.
Photon is the most-used acceleration feature that’s easy to switch on and hard to actually explain. It runs underneath your SQL and yo…
