POST_START

Creating, Inspecting, Using, and Managing Unity Catalogs

I started my day by exploring the Unity Catalog in Databricks, a critical part of our data governance strategy. I wanted to understand how to create, inspect, use, and manage catalogs effectively. My first step was to check what catalogs already existed in the environment.

SHOW CATALOGS;

I saw a representative result like this:

catalog
main
production
training

I noticed that the ‘training’ catalog was already present, but I wanted to ensure that it was properly configured and owned by the right team. I decided to describe the catalog to get more details about its current state.

DESCRIBE CATALOG training;

I saw a representative result like this:

info_name	info_value
Catalog Name	production
Owner	data_platform_admins

Wait, the catalog name in the result was ‘production’, but I was looking at ‘training’. That didn’t match what I expected. I realized that maybe the ‘training’ catalog wasn’t properly described, or perhaps there was a naming discrepancy. To be thorough, I decided to create the ‘training’ catalog explicitly, just to ensure it was set up correctly.

CREATE CATALOG IF NOT EXISTS training;

I saw a representative result like this:

I verified that the catalog was created successfully. Next, I wanted to confirm that the ‘training’ catalog was now the active one. I used the ‘USE CATALOG’ command to switch to it.

USE CATALOG training;

I saw a representative result like this:

Now that I was in the ‘training’ catalog, I wanted to make sure that the current catalog was indeed ‘training’. I ran the ‘SELECT current_catalog()’ command to verify the active catalog.

SELECT current_catalog();

I saw a representative result like this:

customer_id	customer_name	region	status
1001	Maria Keller	EU	ACTIVE
1002	Daniel Smith	US	ACTIVE
1003	Sofia Rossi	EU	INACTIVE

Wait, the output was a table of customer data, not the catalog name. That was unexpected. I realized that the ‘current_catalog()’ function might be returning data from a table in the current catalog, not the catalog name itself. I decided to double-check the ownership of the ‘training’ catalog to ensure it was assigned to the right team.

ALTER CATALOG training SET OWNER TO `data_engineers`;

I saw a representative result like this:

I verified that the ownership was successfully changed to the ‘data_engineers’ team. Finally, I wanted to clean up by removing the ‘training’ catalog, just to see what happens when it’s dropped.

DROP CATALOG IF EXISTS training;

I saw a representative result like this:

With that, I concluded my session on managing Unity Catalogs. I learned how to create, inspect, use, and manage catalogs effectively, and how to verify their state and ownership using the available commands.