Databricks Eliminates Table Format Lock-in and Adds Capabilities for Business Users with Unity Catalog Advancements

Unity Catalog is now the most complete catalog for Apache Iceberg™ and Delta Lake, enabling open interoperability with governance across compute engines, and adds unified semantics and a rich discovery experience for business users

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2025 /CNW/ -- Data + AI Summit -- Databricks, the Data and AI company, today extends its leadership in the unified governance category with powerful new capabilities. Unity Catalog adds full support for Apache Iceberg™ tables, including native support for the Apache Iceberg REST Catalog APIs. Now, Unity Catalog is the only catalog that enables external engines to read and write, with fine-grained governance, to performance-optimized, Iceberg managed tables, eliminating lock-in and enabling seamless interoperability. Databricks is also introducing two new enhancements that extend Unity Catalog to business users. Business metrics and KPIs are the foundation of how companies manage their business, and can now be defined as first-class data assets with Unity Catalog Metrics. In addition, data + AI discovery is enhanced for business users with a new, curated internal marketplace that surfaces the highest-value data, AI and AI/BI assets, organized by business domain. All these assets are augmented with automated data intelligence, so every team can find, trust and act on the right data.

Unity Catalog Now Eliminates the Need to Choose Between Formats
Built on open standards, Unity Catalog is designed to work across every table format and engine. Databricks is now taking that vision further with the Public Preview of full Apache Iceberg support, uniting the Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake ecosystems with a single approach to governance.

The preview adds three new capabilities. First, organizations can create Apache Iceberg managed tables that any Iceberg‑compatible engine can read and write through Unity Catalog's Iceberg REST Catalog API. These Iceberg managed tables benefit from the full power of Unity Catalog: best price performance with AI-powered Predictive Optimization; and unified governance and policy enforcement both within Databricks and across external engines, including Trino, Snowflake, Amazon EMR, etc. Second, Unity Catalog's pioneering Lakehouse Federation capabilities enable seamless access to Iceberg tables managed in external catalogs, so those tables can be discovered and governed alongside native tables. Third, Iceberg tables get all the benefits of the Delta Sharing ecosystem, including seamless cross-organizational sharing of Iceberg tables. These capabilities eliminate format-driven data silos — no other catalog in the industry provides these capabilities.

A Growing Disconnect Between Data Platforms and Business Users
While data platforms have advanced rapidly for technical users, teams across the business remain disconnected from the systems that power their decisions. Technical teams center their world on tables, files, compute and code, while business users operate in BI tools, AI chatbots and focus on KPIs and business metrics in their business domains. These fundamentally different languages result in business users unsure of what data to trust or reliant on engineers for basic questions. Without a unified foundation for business context, organizations face duplicated work, decision paralysis and a persistent gap between data and action.

A Single Source of Truth for Metrics Across the Business 
To address this need, Unity Catalog Metrics brings business metric definitions traditionally embedded within BI tools to the data platform. This creates consistency and accuracy for how everyone in the organization understands business performance. Unlike proprietary Bl semantic layers, Unity Catalog Metrics are fully addressable via SQL to ensure that everyone in the organization can have the same view of metrics, irrespective of what tool they choose. Unity Catalog Metrics is available to all customers today as a Public Preview and will be Generally Available later this summer.

A Unified Foundation for Context: From Guided Discovery to Intelligent Insights
To make trusted data truly usable for business users, Databricks is introducing new Unity Catalog capabilities that blend intuitive discovery with built-in intelligence. A new Discover experience offers a curated internal marketplace of certified data products — organized by business domains like Sales, Marketing, or Finance and enriched with documentation, ownership, tagging and usage insights. Automated, intelligent recommendations coupled with data steward curation tools ensure the highest value assets - metrics, dashboards, tables, AI agents, Genie spaces, etc. - can easily be explored, understood, trusted, and accessed through a self-serve workflow, without manual approvals or engineering support. Unity Catalog Discover is now in Private Preview.

Unity Catalog also now adds intelligence across the experience, surfacing data quality signals, usage patterns, relationships across assets, and certification and deprecation status to help users quickly assess trust and relevance. With Databricks Assistant built into Unity Catalog, they can ask natural language questions and get grounded, contextual answers based on governed metrics — turning discovery into a guided journey where data is accessible, explainable, trustworthy, and ready for use.

"We created the Unified Governance category with Unity Catalog four years ago," said Matei Zaharia, Co-founder and CTO of Databricks. "With these updates to Unity Catalog, we are now offering the best catalog in the industry for Apache Iceberg and all open table formats, and the only one that allows reads and writes to managed tables from external engines, for a truly open enterprise catalog. No matter what table format our customers choose, we ensure it's accessible, optimized, and governed. And with our expanded focus on business users, we're ensuring we deliver on the promise of democratizing data + AI to every user in the enterprise."

Customer + Partner Quotes
"At Riskified, we want to store all our data in an open format and want a single catalog that can connect to all the tools we use," said Hen Ben-Hemo, Data Platform Architect at Riskified. "Unity Catalog allows us to write Iceberg tables that are fully open to any Iceberg client, unlocking the entire lakehouse ecosystem and future proofing our architecture."

"Unity Catalog Metrics gives us a central place to define business KPIs and standardize semantics across teams, ensuring everyone works from the same trusted definitions across dashboards, SQL, and AI applications." — Richard Masters, Vice President, Data & AI, Virgin Atlantic

"Unity Catalog Metrics presents an exciting opportunity to establish consistency, trust, and control in how business metrics are defined and consumed across Zalando. It is a promising contribution to aligned, data-driven decisions across our BI dashboards, notebooks, and other tools." — Timur Yuere, Engineering Manager, Zalando

"Unity Catalog Metrics represents an exciting opportunity for Tableau customers to leverage the value of centralized governance with Databricks Unity Catalog. Through our deep integration and expanding roadmap with Databricks, we're thrilled to help remove the friction for our customers in leveraging Databricks to define their core business metrics" - Nicolas Brisoux, Sr. Director Product Management Tableau

"We're excited to partner with Databricks to integrate Unity Catalog Metrics into Sigma. This gives business teams direct access to trusted, standardized business metrics within their dashboards, so everyone can make decisions based on consistent definitions, without relying on data teams for every question." — Dillion Morrison, VP of Product, Sigma Computing

Availability 
Databricks is introducing Public Preview of full Apache Iceberg support in Unity Catalog. Unity Catalog Metrics is available to all customers today as a Public Preview and will be Generally Available later this summer. Unity Catalog Discover is now in Private Preview.

About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 15,000 organizations worldwide — including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to take control of their data and put it to work with AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, MLflow, and Unity Catalog. To learn more, follow Databricks on X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Databricks