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.
Read more: Databricks docs
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Workspace admin in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- CMMDS
Keeps track of who is in a vSAN cluster and restores that membership, while also storing an inventory of hosts, networks and devices plus object details like policies. An isolated node shows just 1 member in
vmkernel.log. - Workspace
Teams in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric collaborate in this folder-style container, which groups items such as reports, semantic models and lakehouses, controls who can access them and is assigned a capacity.
- 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.
- 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.
- Metastore admin
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.
Related terms
- Custom Spark pool
A Spark pool built by a workspace Admin to their own specification, choosing the size and family of nodes, autoscale limits and whether executors scale dynamically. It needs a capacity that allows pool customisation and usually takes about three minutes to start, unless it's running as a live pool.
- Dynamic allocation
Lets a Spark application grow and shrink its executor count with demand, adding them when busy and giving them up when idle, up to a ceiling set by the workspace admin. In Spark pools the option is named Dynamically allocate executors and is enabled by default together with Autoscale.
- MLflow Issue Detection
A Beta feature, switched on by a workspace admin, in which Genie Code reads MLflow traces and gathers repeated quality and operational problems into issues.
- Workspace identity
A service principal, with its own app registration, that Fabric manages automatically for a single workspace and that only a workspace Admin can create. Items use it to sign in to resources protected by Microsoft Entra, and trusted workspace access depends on it.
- Workspace monitoring
A preview capability that a workspace Admin can switch on, if the tenant permits, to gather metrics and logs from that workspace's items into a monitoring eventhouse. Its KQL database is read-only, holds tables such as ItemJobEventLogs and keeps data for 30 days unless changed.