Row-level security for a RAG agent: what Unity Catalog enforces, and what you have to build

SvenRelijveld — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:19:43 GMT

Two colleagues ask the same chatbot the same question. Should they get the same answer, or

different ones because they are allowed to see different things? Every organisation that puts an AI

assistant on top of its own documents runs into this sooner or later.

Unity Catalog has a good implementation for that on calls to tables. Attach a row filter and a

column mask, and every reader gets their own view of the same object, evaluated against whoever is

asking. It does not have a type of grant for row filters *inside* a vector index. An AI Search

index is a Unity Catalog object with object-level grants, so you can allow or deny querying it, but

it has no row filters and no column masks. Filtering an index is a parameter you pass in the query,

from your own application code.

Re: Row-level security for a RAG agent: what Unity Catalog enforces, and what you have to build

SvenRelijveld — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:50:54 GMT

I'd love to be able to update this, because I pressed reply too early