topic Re: Strategy for Unity Catalog migration in Administration & Architecture

Strategy for Unity Catalog migration

Rodrigo_Mohr — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 02:01:11 GMT

Hi, I am looking for a way to better migrate our workspace to Unity Catalog. We have several tables created as external tables and created using mount points, but I am worried that migrating to unity catalog will break those tables if we migrate using external locations. Whats is the best approach for migrating those tables to unity catalog? Should we rewrite the table structure or create brand new tables once we enable unity catalog? I am worries that user access will also be broken in the process as all access is done via mount points now.

Re: Strategy for Unity Catalog migration

-werners- — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:55:55 GMT

for the migration:

https://docs.databricks.com/data-governance/unity-catalog/migrate.html

The mounts: I am in the process of removing all mounts from our notebooks 😫

Re: Strategy for Unity Catalog migration

karthik_p — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 19:16:42 GMT

@Rodrigo_Mohr you need to mainly consider below things

1. Number of managed tables

2. Number of external tables

in case external tables upgrade tool will help which is built in with UC, where as for managed you need to either go CTAS/Deep clone. but we do have limitations like while migrating external tables it will show which tables can be directly upgraded to UC.

you need to move out form mounts to external locations and that should handle external table upgrades

once after upgrading you can govern users based on new access that UC supports