Description
Unity Catalog is a centralized governance model for managing and securing data in Azure Databricks. It provides fine-grained access control to databases, tables, and views using Microsoft Entra ID identities. Unity Catalog also enhances data lineage, audit logging, and compliance monitoring, making it a critical component for security and governance.
Rationale
- Enforces centralized access control policies and reduces data security risks.
- Enables identity-based authentication via Microsoft Entra ID.
- Improves compliance with industry regulations (e.g. GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2) by providing audit logs and access visibility.
- Prevents unauthorized data access through table-, row-, and column-level security (RLS & CLS).
Impact
- Improperly configured permissions may lead to data exfiltration or unauthorized access.
- Unity Catalog requires structured governance policies to be effective and prevent overly permissive access.
Audit
Method 1: Verify unity catalog deployment:
- As an Azure Databricks account admin, log into the account console.
- Click Workspaces.
- Find your workspace and check the Metastore column. If a metastore name is present, your workspace is attached to a Unity Catalog metastore and therefore enabled for Unity Catalog.
Method 2: Run a SQL query to confirm Unity Catalog enablement
Run the following SQL query in the SQL query editor or a notebook that is attached to a Unity Catalog-enabled compute resource. No admin role is required.
SELECT CURRENT_METASTORE();
If the query returns a metastore ID like the following, then your workspace is attached to a Unity Catalog metastore and therefore enabled for Unity Catalog.
Default Value
New workspaces have Unity Catalog enabled by default. Existing workspaces may require manual enablement.