At a glance
SQL Query Latency p50 (ms) is the median wall-clock time a SQL statement takes to complete on your Databricks SQL warehouses. Half of all queries finish faster than this number, half finish slower. It is the “typical day” reading for warehouse responsiveness: a stable p50 means routine dashboards and ad-hoc queries feel snappy, while a creeping p50 is the first sign that a warehouse is drifting toward saturation or that table layout has degraded.
What it tracks
This card reports the median end-to-end duration of SQL statements run on your Databricks SQL warehouses over the trailing 5 minutes, refreshed in real time. Because it is the median rather than an average, a handful of very slow queries cannot drag it upward, which makes it the cleanest read on the experience of a typical query. Use it as your warehouse baseline: when p50 sits flat at a low value but SQL Query Latency p95 (ms) and SQL Query Latency p99 (ms) climb, the problem is a slow tail (a few heavy queries or skew), not a warehouse-wide slowdown. When p50 itself rises, the whole warehouse is under pressure: check SQL Warehouse Saturation % and Avg Cluster CPU Utilisation % for the cause.Reconciling against the source
To verify, open Query History in the Databricks SQL workspace and filter to the same warehouse and 5-minute window, or querysystem.query.history directly and compute percentile(total_duration_ms, 0.5). Small differences are expected because the workspace UI and the system table can lag query completion by a few seconds and because Vortex IQ aligns the window to your reporting time zone.