Databricks Unity Catalog is the industry’s first unified governance solution for data and AI on the lakehouse. With Unity Catalog, organizations can seamlessly govern their structured and unstructured data, machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards and files on any cloud or platform. Data scientists, analysts and engineers can use Unity Catalog to securely discover, access and collaborate on trusted data and AI assets, leveraging AI to boost productivity and unlock the full potential of the lakehouse environment. This unified approach to governance accelerates data and AI initiatives while ensuring regulatory compliance in a simplified manner.
“Unity Catalog distills permissioning into its important pieces by removing the complexity introduced by IAM policies and other data control platforms, allowing us to focus on what is important to our business use case.”
— Joseph Kesting, Software Engineer
Unified visibility into data and AI
Discover and classify structured and unstructured data, ML models, notebooks, dashboards and arbitrary files on any cloud. Consolidate, map and query data from various platforms, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Azure SQL, Azure Synapse, Google’s BigQuery in one place. Accelerate your data and AI initiatives with a single point of access for data exploration. Boost productivity by securely searching, understanding and extracting insights from your data and AI using natural language.
Single permission model for data and AI
Simplify access management with a unified interface to define access policies on data and AI assets and consistently apply and audit these policies on any cloud or data platform. Securely access data from other computing platforms using open interfaces, with consistent permissions managed in one place. Enhance security with fine-grained control on rows and columns, while efficiently managing access through low-code attribute-based access policies that scale seamlessly.
AI-powered monitoring and observability
Harness the power of AI to automate monitoring, diagnose errors and uphold data and ML model quality. Benefit from proactive alerts that automatically detect personally identifiable information (PII) data, track model drift, and effectively resolve issues within your data and AI pipelines to maintain accuracy and integrity. Streamline debugging, root cause analysis, and impact assessment with automated column-level data lineage. Gain comprehensive lakehouse observability into your data and AI with operational intelligence utilizing built-in system tables for billing, auditing, lineage and more.
Open data sharing
Easily share data and AI assets across clouds, regions and platforms with open source Delta Sharing, natively integrated within Unity Catalog. Securely collaborate with anyone, anywhere to unlock new revenue streams and drive business value, without relying on proprietary formats, complex ETL processes or costly data replication.
“Unity Catalog allowed us to create a unified view of our data estate, simplifying collaboration across teams. We now have a standard approach to manage access permissions and audit files or tables in our lake, with the ability to define fine-grained access controls on rows and columns. Automated data lineage helped us see where the data is coming from to pinpoint the source of a potential threat and to understand which research projects or teams are leveraging the data for threat detection.”
“Unity Catalog enables us to manage all users across multiple workspaces in one central place, so it makes user management significantly easier. Also, the data lineage feature is out of the box, which helps us identify the downstream dependencies without any manual overheads. In the case of BI data, we can figure out how the BI data is flowing and where the users are putting it using data lineage.”
Integrations
Unity Catalog works with your existing data catalogs, data storage systems and governance solutions so you can leverage your existing investments and build a future-proof governance model without expensive migration costs.
