a database is essentially a schema in the Hive metastore.

When you create a database in Databricks, it creates a namespace for tables. This is similar to a schema in traditional relational databases. Behind the scenes, Databricks uses a Hive metastore to manage the metadata of persistent relational entities like databases, tables, columns in a table, and partitions in a table.

So, when you create a database in Databricks, it’s creating a schema in the Hive metastore. When you create a table within a Databricks database, it’s creating a table within that schema in the Hive metastore.

This allows you to use SQL (and HiveQL) to query your data, and it provides compatibility with any other tools that can interact with a Hive metastor

Querying Files