Announcing Public Preview of Unity Catalog Service as a Source

The beauty of Iceberg REST Spec is that it provides a stable interoperability interface for Iceberg clients. For Dremio users, this means that they can get access to Iceberg data where it lives rather than having to build and maintain complex ETL pipelines which increase governance challenges, data latency and operational overhead.

To further our goal of making it easier for customers to connect to their Iceberg data no matter where it lives, we are excited to announce that with the Public Preview of Unity Catalog as a Source, Dremio can now directly connect to Unity Catalog Service and access UniForm enabled Delta tables. 

What is Unity Catalog and UniForm

Unity Catalog is a unified data governance and cataloging service introduced by Databricks to provide fine-grained access control, centralized governance, and data lineage for lakehouse environments. Originally this Catalog only supported Delta tables, but with UniForm Databricks automatically generates Iceberg Metadata which lives alongside the delta tables. This provides an interface for Iceberg Clients to read the underlying data directly from the source. Not only is this ideal for 

How does it work? 

A Dremio user will need to create a Unity Catalog Source connector. This connector will take the Catalog URI and a Personal Access Token generated by a Unity Service Principal. Then from a Dremio User perspective, they can see and read from UniForm enabled Delta tables in Dremio. The downstream experience remains the same as always providing a consistent experience for end users regardless if the Iceberg table is in Unity Catalog, Glue, Nessie or Polaris Service.

Next Steps

We hope you are as excited as we are about these new capabilities in 25.2. We will continue to enhance the connector in the coming releases.

Access the documentation here.