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Connect to external tools and sources

Preview

This feature is in Public Preview.

You can connect external data sources such as Google Drive, SharePoint, GitHub, Glean, and Atlassian to a chat conversation. This allows chat to search your company documents when answering questions. Each user authenticates individually. OAuth tokens are not shared between users.

Connect an external data source​

Connecting external data sources requires the Third Party Connectors for Agents Beta to be enabled in your workspace. See Manage Databricks previews.

  1. On the Genie home page, click chat.

  2. Click the Plus icon. plus icon at the bottom left of the search bar.

  3. Select a data source.

    To connect additional data sources, click More connections at the bottom of the list. You can create a custom MCP connection in Unity Catalog. See Use external MCP servers.

  4. Click Sign in and complete the steps to sign in.

The connection is added to your conversation. Chat can now search your documents when answering questions. After a connection is created, metastore admins and connection owners can manage or revoke user permissions on it. See Share the MCP server connection.

note

Data source tools might not always trigger automatically. If document search doesn't start, try explicitly prompting chat to use the tool, for example "use Google Docs" or "use SharePoint."

Limitations​

External MCP connections (such as Google Drive, SharePoint, and custom MCP servers) are only available in regions where Model Serving is supported.

See supported regions.

Google Drive​

  • When authorizing Google Drive, you might see an "unverified app" screen. Click Advanced and continue the authorization process.
  • Maximum file size is 10MB.
  • Only built-in Google Docs files are supported. PDFs, images, and other binary formats are not supported.
  • Connection or token expiration errors might appear in the agent output. Re-authenticate to the connection to resolve.

SharePoint​

  • Maximum file size is 10MB.
  • Supported file types include built-in SharePoint documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as common text-based formats such as .txt, .csv, .json, .md, and others. PDFs, images, and other binary formats are not supported.

GitHub​

  • By default, the Databricks GitHub MCP connector can access only public repositories. To give the connector read access to your private enterprise repositories, a GitHub organization admin must complete additional setup. See Enable private repository access.
  • GitHub Enterprise Server (the self-hosted version of GitHub) is not supported.

Glean​

  • A workspace admin must first configure the Glean tenant ID before non-admin users can use the connection. The admin can enter the tenant ID when first connecting to Glean.

Custom MCP connection​

  • Databricks recommends using machine-to-machine (M2M) OAuth when configuring the connection. U2M OAuth requires additional setup to register the workspace redirect URI in a custom OAuth app.
  • The connection must be created before you can add it to a chat conversation.
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