GxP-ready pipelines on Databricks: an ALCOA+ map
An auditor picks a lot your site released fourteen months ago and asks a simple question: show me the batch record data exactly as it was when QA released this lot, and every change made to it since. Someone on the team says that’s fine, Delta keeps history, we’ll use time travel. Then they run DESCRIBE HISTORY, and the table only goes back 30 days, because that’s the default delta.logRetentionDuration. The data files behind older versions are gone too. VACUUM keeps seven days of files by default, and on Unity Catalog managed tables, predictive optimization runs it for you. Nobody chose to delete the evidence. The platform cleaned up on schedule, exactly as designed. ...