Best Practices to Follow in Unity Catalog for Efficient Data Management

Data Segregation Source: Databricks

Unity Catalog is a powerful tool that allows you to manage data pipelines and workflows in a unified manner. In order to make the most out of Unity Catalog, it’s important to follow best practices.
In the previous article, we talked about Fine-Grained Access Control with Dynamic Views in Unity Catalog. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best practices you can follow when using Unity Catalog.

Data Segregation at the Catalog Level

One of the most important best practices you can follow is to segregate your data at the catalog level. This involves grouping your data based on their type or use case. By doing so, you can ensure that your data is organized, secure, and easy to manage.

For example, you can create a separate catalog for each team in your organization. This will ensure that each team has access to only the data they need and that there is no confusion about who owns what data.

Manage Identities at the Account Level

Identity management is an important best practice to follow in Unity Catalog. Managing identities at the account level involves ensuring that all users have the appropriate level of access to the data they need.

To manage identities at the account level, you can create groups that correspond to different roles within your organization. For example, you can create a group for data scientists, a group for data engineers, and a group for business analysts. Let’s take an example of a healthcare organization where there are different teams working on different aspects of patient care. The identities could be managed as follows:

CREATE GROUP data_scientists;
CREATE GROUP data_engineers;
CREATE GROUP business_analysts;

GRANT SELECT ON DATABASE patient_data TO data_scientists;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE patient_data TO data_engineers;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE ON DATABASE patient_data TO business_analysts;

In the above example, we have created three groups and granted them different levels of access to the patient_data database. Data scientists can only view the data, data engineers have full access to the database, and business analysts can view, insert, and update data.

Use Identity Federation to Assign at Workspace Level

Identity federation is another best practice to follow in Unity Catalog. Identity federation involves using an external identity provider to manage user identities. By using an external identity provider, you can ensure that user identities are managed centrally and that users can access data across different systems using the same credentials.

For example, you can configure your workspace to use an external identity provider such as Azure Active Directory or Okta. This will allow users to log in using their existing credentials and ensure that their access to data is managed centrally.

Other Best Practices

Here are some other best practices you can follow when using Unity Catalog:

• Use descriptive names for your databases, tables, and columns. This will make it easier to understand what each object contains.
• Use appropriate data types for your columns. This will ensure that your data is stored efficiently and accurately.
• Define partitioning strategies for your tables. This will improve query performance and make it easier to manage large datasets.
• Use schema validation to ensure that data is in the correct format before it is written to your data sources.
• Regularly review and clean up your data to ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.

Unity Catalog is a powerful tool for managing data pipelines and workflows. By following best practices such as data segregation, identity management, and identity federation, you can ensure that your Unity Catalog is organized, secure, and easy to manage. Additionally, using descriptive names, appropriate data types, partitioning strategies, schema validation, and regular data review will help ensure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.

If you found the article to be helpful, you can buy me a coffee here:
Buy Me A Coffee.