Enable Delta Lake row tracking for stable row IDs across MERGE and UPDATE
domain: data-engineering · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Set delta.enableRowTracking = true in TBLPROPERTIES at CREATE TABLE time, or via ALTER TABLE ... SET TBLPROPERTIES on Delta Lake 3.3+ for existing tables.
To default it for all new tables in a session/cluster, set spark.databricks.delta.properties.defaults.enableRowTracking = true.
Confirm the table's protocol supports it — row tracking requires table-features writer version 7, so older readers/writers may need an explicit protocol upgrade.
Query the stable identifiers via the hidden metadata columns _metadata.row_id and _metadata.row_commit_version instead of relying on physical file/row position, which changes across compaction.
Use the row ID downstream to dedupe or join CDC-style updates without re-deriving a business key, since it survives MERGE/UPDATE rewrites of the underlying file.
Known gotchas
Once enabled, the writer-version-7 protocol upgrade cannot be downgraded — plan before enabling on a table that other tools or older readers depend on.
_metadata.row_id and _metadata.row_commit_version are explicitly not accessible when reading via Change Data Feed — row tracking and CDF don't compose on that read path.
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