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UNITY CATALOG BUSINESS SEMANTICS

Unified and open semantics for BI and AI

Centralize business definitions you can trust across all your tools and use cases.
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TOP TEAMS RELY ON UNIFIED SEMANTICS

BENEFITS

Define semantics once. Trust them everywhere.

Centralize business definitions within your Data Intelligence Platform to power AI, BI and data engineering with a single source of truth.

Open and reusable

Access and share your business semantics across tools and use cases. With SQL and API-addressable semantics, you can easily reuse them with your favorite BI tools, notebooks and AI agents — all without vendor lock-in.

Unified governance

Create certified semantic models tightly integrated with your data platform, inheriting your existing data governance policies. With complete lineage and audit visibility, you can ensure a consistent and trusted business context across your entire organization.

Designed for AI

Power AI agents and humans with a flexible semantics layer. Answer new questions and operationalize new business concepts without complex, up-front modeling, continuously keeping your definitions current for faster, more relevant insights.

FEATURES

Stop debating the numbers

Bring centralized semantics into every decision.

Seamlessly connect BI dashboards and AI agents to a single semantic foundation, embedded in your Data Intelligence Platform for consistency and governance.

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Define business metrics with modeling, measures, dimensions and certifications in one place. Auto-materialized for speed and precomputed for frequent queries.

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Equip AI agents and humans with context metadata: LLM instructions, verified queries, display formats and discovery tags/domains to ensure trusted insights.

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Unity Catalog gives lineage, access controls and usage insights out of the box. Compose semantics on your data, and governance policies apply automatically.

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Query semantics with SQL from notebooks, GenAI or apps using REST, ODBC, JDBC, Python, Go or Node.js. SQL-based access from any BI tool integrated with Databricks.

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Works out of the box with AI/BI Genie for natural language queries and drag-and-drop dashboarding using AI/BI Dashboards.

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Use AI to bootstrap semantic definitions based on existing objects (tables and views) in Unity Catalog.

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More features

Precomputation and Smart Query Routing

Queries run faster with precomputed materialized metric views. Databricks manages the data pipelines automatically, and the query optimizer routes each query to the best materialized view.

 

Coming soon

Low-Code Semantic Authoring

A low-code, point-and-click UI to create and edit metric views and datasets. Business users can define metrics, dimensions, measures and relationships — no technical skills required.

 

Coming soon

Simplified Discovery

Certification surfaces trusted assets first, while domains organize content by business-relevant areas. With Discover in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, all of this is delivered in a consumable, user-facing experience.

 

Coming soon

Performance

Metric views automatically generate optimized query plans for each scenario. This includes join elimination/optimization, evaluation of aggregates and filters at the optimal level and more.

USE CASES

Bringing consistency and context to every decision

RELATED PRODUCTS

Discover more

Explore products that extend the power of Unity Catalog Business Semantics across BI and AI.

Unity Catalog

The industry’s only unified and open governance solution for data and AI, built into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.

AI/BI Dashboards

An AI-assisted business intelligence solution, built into the Databricks Platform, to quickly create analytical datasets, interactive dashboards and data visualizations for your business teams.

AI/BI Genie

A conversational experience, powered by generative AI, for business teams to explore data and self-serve insights in real time through natural language.

Databricks SQL

An intelligent, self-optimizing data warehouse built on lakehouse architecture, offering the best price/performance in the market.

Databricks One

A single place for business teams to explore AI/BI Dashboards, talk with Genie and use custom-built Databricks Apps.

Take the next step

Unity Catalog Business Semantics FAQ

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