Databricks Unity Catalog is a built-in governance solution that unifies discovery, access control, data lineage,audit , , secure sharing, quality monitoring, and business semantics across data and AI assets, all Databricks workspaces and beyond. It gives teams a centralized way to define and enforce policies on data whether the data is stored natively in Databricks or accessed from federated sources such as SAP.

Through its native integration with open source Delta Sharing protocol, Unity Catalog also enables secure, governed data exchange with external parties or business units across any platform. This eliminates the need to duplicate data across platforms while retaining complete control over who sees what and when.

Key capabilities include:

● Unified catalog for data and AI: Manage structured data, unstructured data, business metrics, and dashboards. and AI models in one place

● Supports all open data formats: Work with any open data format—Delta, Apache Iceberg, Parquet, and more.

● Fine-grained governance: Apply consistent policies across clouds and data domains.

● Federated data support: Govern external sources like SAP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Salesforce, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and more with the same control plane.

● Automated lineage: Gain full visibility into how data is used across the organization.

● Quality monitoring: Monitor data and AI quality at scale with automated quality monitoring and proactive alerts.

● Open APIs: Read/Write data from any external tool of your choice with open APIs and avoid vendor lock-in.

● Business semantics: Define and govern business metrics in one place and use across any use case for consistent business semantics.

● Delta sharing: Use the open sharing standard to collaborate securely and efficiently with partners, customers, and teams across tools and platforms.

Together, these capabilities help organizations scale governance to meet the demands of modern analytics, AI, and data collaboration without slowing down innovation.