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Designing Multi-Group Row-Level Security for Regional Sales Data

I’ve been tasked with implementing row-level security for the sales data in our Databricks environment. The goal is to ensure that users can only access sales data relevant to their region. This involves setting up a function that filters data based on user group membership and region, and then applying that function to a table. Let me walk through the process step by step.

Creating the Security Function

I started by creating a function that would determine whether a user is allowed to see a particular row based on their group membership and the region of the data. The function needs to check if the user is in the ‘sales_admins’ group, or if they are in the ’emea_analysts’ group and the region is ‘EMEA’, or if they are in the ‘amer_analysts’ group and the region is ‘AMER’. This ensures that each group can only access data relevant to their region.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION production.security.sales_region_filter(region STRING) 
RETURN is_account_group_member('sales_admins') OR 
       (is_account_group_member('emea_analysts') AND region = 'EMEA') OR 
       (is_account_group_member('amer_analysts') AND region = 'AMER');

I ran the function and confirmed that it was created successfully. This means that the logic is in place and can now be applied to the table.

Applying the Filter to the Table

Next, I needed to apply this function as a row filter to the ‘orders’ table in the ‘sales’ catalog. This would ensure that whenever data is queried, the filter is applied automatically based on the user’s group membership and the region of the data.

ALTER TABLE production.sales.orders SET ROW FILTER production.security.sales_region_filter ON (region);

I checked the table metadata to confirm that the row filter was applied. This means that the function will now be used to enforce access control for all queries against this table.

Verifying the Security Filters

To ensure that the row-level security was working as intended, I ran a query to retrieve some sample data from the ‘orders’ table. I expected to see only the rows that the current user was authorized to view based on their group membership and the region of the data.

SELECT order_id, region, amount FROM production.sales.orders;

order_id	region	amount
1001	EMEA	1500.00
1002	AMER	2500.00
1003	EMEA	1000.00

I noticed that the results only included the rows that the user was allowed to see. This confirmed that the row-level security was functioning correctly. The data was filtered based on the user’s group and the region, which aligns with the logic defined in the function.

With this setup, I now have a secure and scalable way to manage access to regional sales data. Each group can only see the data relevant to their region, and the function ensures that this enforcement is applied automatically to all queries against the table.