Photon is enabled by default on many Databricks compute configurations. While it can accelerate certain SQL and DataFrame operations, its performance benefits are workload-specific and may not justify the increased DBU cost. Many pipelines, particularly ETL jobs or simpler Spark workloads, do not benefit materially from Photon but still incur the higher DBU multiplier. Disabling Photon by default and allowing it only where proven beneficial can reduce cost without degrading performance.
Databricks charges based on Databricks Units (DBUs), which are consumed per node per hour. Enabling Photon increases the DBU rate by up to 2.9x compared to standard compute. While Photon can significantly reduce runtime for certain workloads, in many environments the performance benefit is marginal, resulting in higher cost without proportional gain.
