Decathlon’s Race to Unified Governance: Securing Interoperability at Scale

Decathlon, operating in 70+ countries, aims to make wellbeing accessible through sport. Scaling to thousands of tables strained our legacy metadata management (AWS Glue). Moving to Unity Catalog (UC) unified governance for 2,000+ users but created a key challenge: How to centralize governance within the Databricks Lakehouse while maintaining interoperability with external engines?This session details Decathlon’s migration from AWS Glue to Unity Catalog, focusing on how we ensured "openness" so that external engines—EMR, Athena, Polars, DuckDB—remain compatible and performant under UC. We will share the framework used to automate the transition of thousands of tables and present metrics on improved metadata rendering speeds and streamlined platform administration.