Welcome to All Things Unity Catalog!

Inaugural Blog Post

First of all, welcome to this first of many blog posts written by Databricks enthusiasts, practitioners, colleagues, and friends from other organizations! Let me explain who we are in more detail and what goals we strive to meet.

Subject Matter Experts

Within Databricks, we like to organize around specific topics, and one of those is Data Governance. While the definition of the term varies, at Databricks, we decided to consolidate all of our efforts regarding this topic under the Unity Catalog umbrella. This means, for us, that the two terms are synonymous, even if not all of the larger Data Governance topics are applicable here.

The team we are part of is called Unity Catalog Subject Matter Expert Group, or UC SMEs for short. While being part of Field Engineering, our role is usually called Solution Architect, and our focus is on the following:

• Helping Users — In the end, we are all using the Databricks platform on behalf of our customers. We help solve any question, from easy to very hard. At the same time we capture what our colleagues and customers need to funnel the asks back to our product management, which then can implement the features in the platform.
• Architectural Patterns—While listening to our colleagues and customers, we also try to find what works and what does not. We compile these into architectural patterns that can be reused and implemented successfully. This often significantly shortens project timelines and sets our customers up for early success!
• Thought Leadership — Sometimes our discussions go beyond the operational and tactical and allow us to share our vision and strategic plans for Unity Catalog and Data Governance as a whole. It reflects years of experience, working with the largest organizations in the world.

Our goal is to extend these focus areas to the blog posts as well.

What’s Next

You can expect high-quality content from this channel and the blog posts published, produced not just by us, the UC SMEs, but also by other relevant folks, such as our engineering team and third-party partners — if you are interested please reach out to us directly! We will ensure that each blog post is reviewed and vetted by the core team so that you will find rich and informative topics covered that span the Databricks platform and beyond.

Let me welcome you again on behalf of the team and express my sincere hope that you will find interesting content and learn something about our work here at Databricks!