Databricks, a leading data and AI company, further solidifies its leadership across the entire data lakehouse ecosystem with differentiated innovations including Iceberg and Delta Lake support, cross-engine governance, and business metric integration.

Databricks announced an enhanced version of 'Unity Catalog' on the 23rd.

With this update, the catalog natively supports the Apache Iceberg REST catalog API, enabling Iceberg tables to be read and written not only by Databricks but also by external engines such as Trino, Snowflake, and Amazon EMR.

By integrating Delta Lake and Iceberg into a single governance framework, it has evolved into an open standard governance platform encompassing various table formats.

Looking at the three key features available in the public preview, first, support for the Iceberg REST Catalog API enables the creation of managed tables and read/write operations on any Iceberg-compatible engine, and second, it provides optimal performance relative to cost through Databricks' AI predictive optimization.

In addition, the Lakehouse Federation natively manages Iceberg tables from an external catalog. It allows for navigation and governance like a table.

Furthermore, by utilizing Delta Sharing, Iceberg tables can be securely shared between organizations, fundamentally resolving silos based on data format.

This announcement stands out for significantly expanding features for business users in addition to technology users.

Through 'Unity Catalog Metrics,' KPI and metric definitions scattered across BI tools were integrated into a platform and elevated into first-class data assets directly accessible via SQL.

This enables consistent metric interpretation across business domains, such as sales, marketing, and finance teams, and allows for data analysis and decision-making based on the same standards without the need for engineer assistance.

The business exploration experience is also newly provided in the form of an internal marketplace called 'Discover'.

You can search for and receive recommendations for high-value assets such as curated tables, dashboards, AI agents, and Genie Spaces by domain, and easily find reliable data through metadata including documents, owners, and usage status, as well as AI-based automatic recommendation features. It is available for self-serve use without an approval process and is currently being offered as a private preview.

Unity Catalog adds intelligence across the user experience by visualizing data quality signals, usage patterns, associations between assets, authentication, and revocation status.

By asking the built-in 'Databricks Assistant' questions in natural language, you can receive contextual and reliable real-time answers based on policy-based metrics, making your data exploration journey smarter.

Matei Zaharia, co-founder and CTO of Databricks, emphasized, “Four years ago, we led integrated governance with the Unity Catalog, and with this update, we have completed the industry’s best catalog across all open table formats, including Iceberg and Delta Lake.”

He also added, “As the only platform that allows free reading and writing of management tables from external engines, we will realize the democratization of data and AI for business users.”