External engines can create, read, and write to Unity Catalog managed Delta tables with centralized governance and automatic optimizations.

by Alex Jiang and Tathagata “TD” Das

Unity Catalog was designed for interoperability at scale. Enterprises have the flexibility to run any engine on a single copy of data with governance enforced centrally.

Today, we are taking interoperability a step further. We're excited to announce that external access to Unity Catalog (UC) managed Delta tables is now in Public Preview.

Over the past year, a growing list of engines, from Apache Spark and Flink to now Starburst and DuckDB, have integrated with UC managed Delta tables, and the ecosystem continues to grow. Enterprises can get the best of both worlds: the price-performance benefits of UC managed tables and the flexibility to use the engines that fit each workload. Unity Catalog remains the central governance layer, ensuring that access policies are enforced consistently across engines.