Catalog Management and Data Organization

In this course, you will learn how to design, implement, and govern catalog structures and large-scale data organization on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. It offers a comprehensive view of Unity Catalog as the centralized governance layer for an enterprise lakehouse. Divided into five modules, it begins by placing Unity Catalog within the cloud deployment model — covering the Account Console, metastore creation, and the administrator role hierarchy. You will then translate organizational topology (business units, regions, and dev/QA/prod environments) into a scalable catalog and schema design using naming conventions, ownership patterns, and MANAGE delegation. The course then covers secure storage integration with storage credentials, external locations, the managed-storage hierarchy, managed versus external tables, and UC Volumes for non-tabular data. Next, you will apply access patterns and isolation strategies — the three-level GRANT chain, workspace-catalog binding, and schema-level Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) policies — to enforce fine-grained data protection at scale. Finally, the course closes with best practices for catalog design, automation, least-privilege permissions, and group-based access management.

Note: Databricks Academy is transitioning to a notebook-based format for classroom sessions within the Databricks environment, discontinuing the use of slide decks for lectures. You can access the lecture notebooks in the Vocareum lab environment.