Delta Sharing and Unity Catalog—Lessons Learned at T-Mobile

When teams are setting up a new data architecture, it's likely that they will feel overwhelmed while also being unaware of the many potential landmines. We will discuss our learnings at T-Mobile regarding how to build a lakehouse, integrate into a data mesh using Unity Catalog and external Delta Sharing, and enable teams across the enterprise while still maintaining a rational and easily understood security model. Topics we will discuss: Delta Sharing, shared metastore administration, catalog administration, security tooling (timeboxing, approvals, auditability, etc.), scaffolding automation for new schemas/containers/external locations, onboarding existing non-UC lakehouse objects, and gather all sorts of metrics, from query cost to data sharing usage.