An optional Unity Catalog role responsible for access, ownership and top-level objects within a single metastore. Holders can't read data by default; they would first have to grant themselves privileges or take ownership, and that leaves an audit record.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Metastore admin in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Unity Catalog
Azure Databricks' governance solution covering both data and AI in one place, with centralised permissions, auditing, data discovery and lineage.
- Role
How an actor normally or expectedly behaves, or the part a person takes in a process. A single actor may hold more than one role.
- RACI
Stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, informed. A RACI chart lists functions and shows, for each, the single team accountable and the teams in the other three roles; the Cloud Adoption Framework includes worked examples.
- Object owner
Every Unity Catalog securable, and every workspace object such as a job or warehouse, has exactly one owner (IS OWNER), which can be a user, a group or a service principal. That owner holds every capability on the object, though child objects do not inherit the ownership.
- Metastore
The highest-level Unity Catalog container, holding metadata and permissions for a single cloud region. Each region has only one, which every workspace in that region shares, and it is not meant to be the usual boundary for isolating data.
- CRUD
Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.
- FIRST
A DAX function available only inside visual calculations. It fetches the value at the start of one axis of the visual's matrix, which makes it handy for comparing each point with the first; its opposite is LAST.
- Authorisation code
OAuth 2.0 grant used by native and web apps: the user signs in, and the app then acts on their behalf with delegated permissions.
Related terms
- Unified trace table
Once a metastore admin has set it up, this Beta Unity Gateway feature collects every model and MCP call in a single Unity Catalog table as OpenTelemetry spans. For compliance, rely on audit logs, since delivery here is only best effort.
- Workspace admin
Manages the membership, jobs and objects of a single workspace. With Unity Catalog, this role cannot grant on existing objects it doesn't own, which a metastore admin can.