Schema

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DP-750DP-800

Each book explains Schema 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.

• Catalog

  The first level of Unity Catalog's catalog.schema.table naming and the primary boundary for isolating data. Privileges granted on a catalog flow down to every schema and object it contains.

• 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.

• Usage privileges

  USE CATALOG and USE SCHEMA: alone they expose no data, yet reaching any object inside requires them, so owners of catalogs and schemas can cap what table owners share.

Related terms

• ABAC policy

  Governed tags drive this kind of Unity Catalog rule: when a table or column has tags that satisfy its WHEN and MATCH COLUMNS conditions, a row filter or column mask UDF is put on it automatically. Policies are written with CREATE POLICY and can sit on a metastore, catalog, schema or table.

• ACID

  Four promises a database transaction makes: atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. Azure Cosmos DB honours them, with snapshot isolation, only inside one logical partition, using stored procedures, triggers or transactional batch.

• Active geo-replication

  Azure SQL Database feature that replicates a single database to as many as four readable secondaries, failed over manually. SQL Managed Instance does not offer it.

• ADR

  A recovery design in the Database Engine. Changes are versioned inside the user database, in what's called a persistent version store, which makes rolling back almost immediate and recovery time constant. Azure SQL Database, SQL database in Fabric and Managed Instance have it permanently enabled.

• AGENTS.md

  A Markdown file format, recognised across different AI coding agents, for telling them how to behave. Copilot on GitHub looks for AGENTS.md files in a repo; SSMS looks for extended properties of that name on database objects and follows them.

• ALLOW_BUILTIN_TVF_IN_ALL_COMPAT_LEVELS

  Lets functions like REGEXP_SPLIT_TO_TABLE, REGEXP_MATCHES and OPENJSON be used whatever the database's compatibility level. It is a database scoped configuration, currently in preview, for SQL database in Fabric and Azure SQL Database.

• Always Encrypted

  Client-side encryption of SQL columns using keys never revealed to the database engine, meaning cloud administrators and DBAs only ever see ciphertext.

• Audit action group

  Named bundle of database-engine events, BATCH_COMPLETED_GROUP being one, selected when defining an audit policy. By default Azure SQL audits BATCH_COMPLETED_GROUP together with successful and failed database authentication.