Unity Catalog Fine-Grained Access Controls on External Engines
Unity Catalog enforces fine-grained access controls on external engines like open-source Spark, not just Databricks.
“Fine-grained access controls defined once and enforced everywhere, plus external engines that can read and write to UC managed tables.”
Databricks demonstrates Unity Catalog's attribute-based access controls (row filters and column masks via governed tags) being enforced consistently across both Databricks serverless SQL and external open-source Apache Spark running on EC2. This matters for enterprise data governance in open lakehouse architectures, letting teams keep one copy of data while governing access uniformly across compute engines, though it is a data-platform feature rather than a core AI signal.