Accelerating Data Democratization with Databricks’ Unity Catalog

Joshua Gould
.
August 22, 2024
Accelerating Data Democratization with Databricks’ Unity Catalog

For data and analytics leaders, ensuring secure and efficient access to data across the organization is crucial. One of the biggest announcements of Databricks’ Data & AI Summit (DAIS) 2024 was the open sourcing of Unity Catalog– a unified governance solution for data and AI assets. As organisations collect and utilise data from an increasing number of sources, the challenges of data governance, security, and accessibility are becoming increasingly complex. Enter: Databricks’ Unity Catalog - a unified solution that is rapidly becoming a natural cornerstone to the majority of Data and AI solutions.

The Unity Catalog is especially relevant as companies seek to advance their AI initiatives. Building an AI-ready data ecosystem is crucial to remaining competitive. By providing governed access to data, it enables organizations to move beyond isolated AI experiments to full-scale enterprise implementations. This platform simplifies collaboration, enhances data quality, and ensures that AI models are built on a foundation of trusted, well-managed data.

Unity Catalog is a unified solution for data and AI governance

Unity Catalog is a central place to administer data access policies across all platforms which automatically maintains an audit log of actions performed on a data asset. It also tracks data asset lineage across all languages and offers tagging and documenting of data sources. This then feeds into its search interface for easy discovery.

The open-sourcing of Unity Catalog unlocks huge benefits for businesses as it allows for a single unified solution for data and AI governance across cloud platforms, data platforms and data formats. This makes it easier for data to be shared between teams, avoiding data silos, and it further enables the discovery of new data elements and uncovering of more insights. It is also required to get value from a lot of the new features Databricks have recently released, such as Mosaic AI.  

In addition to open sourcing Unity Catalog, at DAIS, Databricks also announced Unity Catalog Metrics. Having worked with organizations where data is spread across different teams, departments and systems, we have seen how key business metrics have been defined differently across departments and the impact it has on data democratization and the goal of a single source of truth.  

Unpacking these differences is often challenging and time-consuming. Metrics solves this by keeping key KPIs centralized, verified, consistent and secure across an organization as they can now be defined and governed inside of Unity Catalog as Metrics.  

Metrics are searchable and quarriable within the catalog explorer improving data discovery and insights across a business. For each Metric you can see who built it, who certified it, where it is used and predefined dimensions associated with it. This is a game-changer for several reasons: firstly, you can see what will be impacted should changes be made and inform those who will be affected. Further, seeing these predefined dimensions enhances users' ability to independently engage with metrics to answer their questions. Finally, you can interact with and query Metrics inside of a Genie workspace using natural language. This is amazing for data democratization as it enables users with limited data knowledge to access to the data that should be driving their decision-making.

Sharing is Caring: Secure Data Governance for Data Democratization

Unity Catalog is continuing to impact how we approach data governance; Making data more secure, traceable and discoverable enables businesses to make better data-driven decisions faster and with more confidence. Utilizing a unified solution for data governance sets companies of all sizes up for long term success, as it allows for an agile, scalable data infrastructure to be built on top. Essentially, Unity Catalog is set up to support both your current data & AI projects, but also your data & AI projects of tomorrow.

Furthermore, utilizing a unified solution means avoiding dreaded data silos. Unity Catalog presents a secure way to give the right people access to the right data and models at the right time while keeping everything in one place. This gives companies the ability to keep a single source of truth while keeping data democratized across the organization.

The open-sourcing of Unity Catalog is fantastic news for the industry and data landscape. Having the functionality to register and manage data assets across cloud providers, compute sources, and data formats without vendor lock-in as an issue is awesome as it removes barriers that organizations may have been facing when looking to utilize more Databricks features that are tied to Unity Catalog.

Worried about the pitfalls of data democratization? Click here to learn how to manage the risks while unlocking the potential of your data.

The Future of Data Governance is here

We help people do data and AI right; data governance, discovery, and lineage are a core part of this.  At Blend we approach every solution we create as tech-agnostic, which means that we always want to make sure we choose the right tools for the job at hand. That considered, we find Unity Catalog to be a powerful data governance tool as it allows us to build with the future in mind, creating an agile cornerstone for both current and future data & AI projects.  

As data experts, we understand the benefits of implementing Unity Catalog when it’s right for the project, and we work closely with our clients take ownership of these benefits to craft solutions that adds value– like we did for this Media Giant.

The future of data governance is here, and it is unified, secure, and accessible - thanks to Databricks' Unity Catalog.

Keep Reading: How Databricks' AI/BI Release Signals a Shift in Data Strategy

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For data and analytics leaders, ensuring secure and efficient access to data across the organization is crucial. One of the biggest announcements of Databricks’ Data & AI Summit (DAIS) 2024 was the open sourcing of Unity Catalog– a unified governance solution for data and AI assets. As organisations collect and utilise data from an increasing number of sources, the challenges of data governance, security, and accessibility are becoming increasingly complex. Enter: Databricks’ Unity Catalog - a unified solution that is rapidly becoming a natural cornerstone to the majority of Data and AI solutions.

The Unity Catalog is especially relevant as companies seek to advance their AI initiatives. Building an AI-ready data ecosystem is crucial to remaining competitive. By providing governed access to data, it enables organizations to move beyond isolated AI experiments to full-scale enterprise implementations. This platform simplifies collaboration, enhances data quality, and ensures that AI models are built on a foundation of trusted, well-managed data.

Unity Catalog is a unified solution for data and AI governance

Unity Catalog is a central place to administer data access policies across all platforms which automatically maintains an audit log of actions performed on a data asset. It also tracks data asset lineage across all languages and offers tagging and documenting of data sources. This then feeds into its search interface for easy discovery.

The open-sourcing of Unity Catalog unlocks huge benefits for businesses as it allows for a single unified solution for data and AI governance across cloud platforms, data platforms and data formats. This makes it easier for data to be shared between teams, avoiding data silos, and it further enables the discovery of new data elements and uncovering of more insights. It is also required to get value from a lot of the new features Databricks have recently released, such as Mosaic AI.  

In addition to open sourcing Unity Catalog, at DAIS, Databricks also announced Unity Catalog Metrics. Having worked with organizations where data is spread across different teams, departments and systems, we have seen how key business metrics have been defined differently across departments and the impact it has on data democratization and the goal of a single source of truth.  

Unpacking these differences is often challenging and time-consuming. Metrics solves this by keeping key KPIs centralized, verified, consistent and secure across an organization as they can now be defined and governed inside of Unity Catalog as Metrics.  

Metrics are searchable and quarriable within the catalog explorer improving data discovery and insights across a business. For each Metric you can see who built it, who certified it, where it is used and predefined dimensions associated with it. This is a game-changer for several reasons: firstly, you can see what will be impacted should changes be made and inform those who will be affected. Further, seeing these predefined dimensions enhances users' ability to independently engage with metrics to answer their questions. Finally, you can interact with and query Metrics inside of a Genie workspace using natural language. This is amazing for data democratization as it enables users with limited data knowledge to access to the data that should be driving their decision-making.

Sharing is Caring: Secure Data Governance for Data Democratization

Unity Catalog is continuing to impact how we approach data governance; Making data more secure, traceable and discoverable enables businesses to make better data-driven decisions faster and with more confidence. Utilizing a unified solution for data governance sets companies of all sizes up for long term success, as it allows for an agile, scalable data infrastructure to be built on top. Essentially, Unity Catalog is set up to support both your current data & AI projects, but also your data & AI projects of tomorrow.

Furthermore, utilizing a unified solution means avoiding dreaded data silos. Unity Catalog presents a secure way to give the right people access to the right data and models at the right time while keeping everything in one place. This gives companies the ability to keep a single source of truth while keeping data democratized across the organization.

The open-sourcing of Unity Catalog is fantastic news for the industry and data landscape. Having the functionality to register and manage data assets across cloud providers, compute sources, and data formats without vendor lock-in as an issue is awesome as it removes barriers that organizations may have been facing when looking to utilize more Databricks features that are tied to Unity Catalog.

Worried about the pitfalls of data democratization? Click here to learn how to manage the risks while unlocking the potential of your data.

The Future of Data Governance is here

We help people do data and AI right; data governance, discovery, and lineage are a core part of this.  At Blend we approach every solution we create as tech-agnostic, which means that we always want to make sure we choose the right tools for the job at hand. That considered, we find Unity Catalog to be a powerful data governance tool as it allows us to build with the future in mind, creating an agile cornerstone for both current and future data & AI projects.  

As data experts, we understand the benefits of implementing Unity Catalog when it’s right for the project, and we work closely with our clients take ownership of these benefits to craft solutions that adds value– like we did for this Media Giant.

The future of data governance is here, and it is unified, secure, and accessible - thanks to Databricks' Unity Catalog.

Keep Reading: How Databricks' AI/BI Release Signals a Shift in Data Strategy