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Connecting to Databricks Unity Catalog

Promethium integrates with Databricks Unity Catalog to enable metadata discovery and distributed querying. Once connected, Promethium will crawl Unity schemas, tables, and columns, and make them available for query and exploration.

This guide walks you through the steps to securely connect your Databricks account to Promethium using read-only access.

Prerequisites​

To connect Databricks Unity to Promethium, you’ll need the following:

  • Databricks Workspace URL The unique URL for your Databricks Workspace
  • Catalog name The name of the Catalog to use with the Workspace
  • Personal Access Token An authentication token for the service account (required for metadata crawling and query execution)
  • Unity Region The region that the Unity Catalog resides

Authentication​

💡 We recommend creating a dedicated Databricks user for Promethium with limited read-only privileges.

This user requires the following minimum permissions;

Supported Table Formats​

The Promethium Crawler can only catalog tables that are Iceberg compliant. Compliant tables need to have the following table properties;

TBLPROPERTIES (
'delta.minReaderVersion' = '2',
'delta.minWriterVersion' = '5',
'delta.columnMapping.mode' = 'name',
'delta.enableIcebergCompatV2' = 'true',
'delta.universalFormat.enabledFormats' = 'iceberg'
);

Known Restrictions​

The Promethium Crawler currently only detects tables.