Unity Catalog provides a centralized platform for managing data access policies across all workspaces and personas.

The security model of Unity Catalog is built on standard ANSI SQL, enabling administrators to assign permissions in their data lake using familiar syntax at various levels such as catalogs, databases, tables, and views.

Unity Catalog automatically generates user-level audit logs that track data access.

External tables are the default method for creating tables in Unity Catalog. These tables are stored in the configured root storage location upon metastore creation and utilize the Delta table format.

Unity Catalog captures runtime data lineage for queries executed in any language on a Databricks cluster or SQL warehouse, including detailed column-level lineage and related notebooks, workflows, and dashboards.