Databricks SQL warehouses are offered as Classic, Pro, and Serverless products. The tiers differ in features, infrastructure management, and DBU rates.
Classic SQL warehouses use customer-managed compute. Pro adds features such as enhanced performance and governance. Serverless runs the infrastructure in Databricks-managed accounts and includes that infrastructure in a higher DBU rate.
The dollar rate depends on plan, cloud, region, and contract. A comparison should include DBUs, cloud infrastructure, startup behavior, concurrency, and the query latency required by the workload.
Use Jobs or SQL compute for scheduled work and All-Purpose compute for interactive notebooks when the workload matches those products. Databricks publishes the applicable rates on its pricing page.