Unity Catalog (Preview)

Preview

Unity Catalog is in Public Preview. The account console UI for Unity Catalog is in Private Preview. To participate in the preview, contact your Databricks representative.

Unity Catalog is a fine-grained governance solution for data and AI on the Lakehouse.

Unity Catalog helps simplify security and governance of your data with the following key features:

• Define once, secure everywhere: Unity Catalog offers a single place to administer data access policies that apply across all workspaces and personas.

• Standards-compliant security model: Unity Catalog’s security model is based on standard ANSI SQL, and allows administrators to grant permissions at the level of catalogs, databases (also called schemas), tables, and views in their existing data lake using familiar syntax.

• Built-in auditing: Unity Catalog automatically captures user-level audit logs that record access to your data.

Note

Review the limitations for Unity Catalog during this public preview.

The account console is a web UI from which you can create and manage metastores, link metastores to workspaces, and manage account-level users and groups who can access data in metastores. Unity Catalog stores certain information in the account console.

Unity Catalog requires a Databricks account on the Premium plan.

In this guide:

• Get started using Unity Catalog
• Key concepts
• Data permissions
• Key tasks
• Create compute resources
• Create a metastore
• Create catalogs and schemas
• Manage account-level identities
• Create tables
• Create views
• Manage access to data
• Manage external locations and storage credentials
• Query data
• Train a machine-learning model with Python from data in Unity Catalog
• Connect to BI tools
• Audit access and activity for Unity Catalog resources
• Upgrade tables and views to Unity Catalog
• Automate Unity Catalog setup using Terraform
• Limitations