Organizations collecting and using personal data must now heed a growing body of regulations, and the penalties for noncompliance are stiff. The ubiquity of the cloud and the advent of generative AI have only made it more crucial to govern data appropriately. Thousands of companies have turned to Databricks Unity Catalog to simplify data governance and manage their data and AI assets more effectively. This practical guide helps you do the same.

Databricks data specialists Kiran Sreekumar and Karthik Subbarao dive deep into Unity Catalog and share the best practices that enable data practitioners to build and serve their data and AI assets at scale. Data product owners, data engineers, AI/ML engineers, and data executives will examine various facets of data governance—including data sharing, auditing, access controls, and automation—as they discover how to establish a robust data governance framework that complies with regulations.

• Explore data governance fundamentals and understand how they relate to Unity Catalog
• Utilize Unity Catalog to unify data and AI governance
• Access data efficiently for analytics
• Implement different data protection mechanisms
• Securely share data and AI assets internally and externally with Delta Sharing

Table of Contents

Prologue: Governance by Choice

Chapter 1. The Modern Governance Stack

Chapter 2. Unity Catalog Under the Hood

Chapter 3. Identity Management

Chapter 4. Unity Catalog and Compute

Chapter 5. Access Controls and Permissions Model

Chapter 6. Governing Al

Chapter 7. Observability and Discoverability

Chapter 8. Data Sharing and Collaboration

Chapter 9. Open Access

Chapter 10. Being Compliant with Regulatory Standards

Chapter 11. Accelerating Unity Catalog Adoption

Chapter 12. The Future of Unity Catalog

About the Authors

Kiran Sreekumar is a data architect with deep expertise in engineering and data and AI governance. Since 2012, he has been designing and building data engineering, data warehousing, and data governance solutions, accumulating more than 15 years of experience across a variety of industries. While at Tata Consultancy Services (2012-2015)—a period when Hadoop and big data were just taking off—Kiran helped create one of the first data archival and governance products on the Apache Hadoop platform, Active Archive. Following that, he contributed to numerous large-scale data analytics programs. Today, he works at Databricks as a specialist in data and AI governance and engineering, where he partners with customers to embed robust governance practices into modern data pipelines. He is an active speaker on data and AI topics at conferences and a passionate advocate for trustworthy data stewardship. Kiran holds a bachelor of technology degree in electronics and communications and is based in the United Kingdom.

Karthik Subbarao is a specialist in data + AI platform and governance at Databricks, helping organizations build secure, scalable data and AI platforms. With over a decade of experience in software engineering, architecture, big data, and AI, he combines deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to solving complex challenges. Karthik holds an MSc degree in computer science from the Technical University of Munich and regularly shares insights through blogs, conference talks, and community events. Based in Germany, Karthik is passionate about building secure, trusted data platforms for the AI era.