Unity Catalog connection

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DBX-DEPDBX-GENAIDP-750

Each book explains Unity Catalog connection in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• 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.

• Connection

  Resource that attaches a virtual network gateway to its peer, which may be an ExpressRoute circuit, a second VNet gateway (Vnet2Vnet) or a local network gateway over IPsec. Resetting it recovers a single tunnel and avoids rebooting the whole gateway.

• Lakehouse Federation

  Azure Databricks' approach to query federation: foreign catalogs and Unity Catalog connections expose outside databases and catalogs for governed, read-only queries, with work pushed down to the source when possible.

• Schema

  The middle part of a Unity Catalog name (catalog.schema.table), grouping tables, views, volumes, functions and models inside a catalog. A grant on it covers everything in it now and later, and nothing inside can be reached without USE SCHEMA.

Related terms

• External MCP server

  An MCP server you host yourself or get from a third party, then register with Unity Gateway for governance. It has to support Streamable HTTP, and a Unity Catalog connection stores its credentials.

• Integrated CDC

  A Lakeflow Connect design for SQL Server ingestion in which one pipeline points at a Unity Catalog connection, with no separate ingestion gateway needed.

• Kinesis

  Amazon's streaming message service, which Structured Streaming can read from. Databricks advises using a Unity Catalog connection of type KINESIS for authentication on Runtime 19 and later.

• remote_query

  Lets you write a query in another system's own SQL dialect and run it there through a Unity Catalog connection, with the results returned as a table.