Automatic UC enablement with existing Unity Catalog

[scott1]

Hello,

The environment I'm working in has an existing account and unity catalog in our primary region. These have been primarily PoC, and have existed for a year or so.

Now we're building out our IaC and getting ready to move towards production. 

In new regions where I'm testing i'm seeing the automatic enablement, and all new workspaces are automatically assigned to the new UC (great).

My question is whether it's possible to replicate this behavior in our existing region. We might not be able to get account level admin access to do the assignment during deployment of a new environment/workspace, so having that automatic assignment would be ideal.

My second question, since my new workspaces don't seem to be currently attached to the UC, is why does the default storage account that databricks creates include a container called unity-catalog-storage, and what is that container used for?

[Kaniz_Fatma]

Hi @scott1, it is possible to replicate the automatic enablement behaviour in your existing region, but you will need to have an account admin role in that region.

Account admins can enable workspaces for Unity Catalog by assigning them to a Unity Catalog metastore. A metastore is the top-level container for data in Unity Catalog. Each metastore exposes a 3-level namespace (catalog.schema.table) by which data can be organized. You can share a single metastore across multiple Azure Databricks workspaces in an account.

To enable a workspace for Unity Catalog, you can follow these steps:

• Sign in to the Azure portal as an account admin.
• Navigate to your workspace and select Settings > Data governance > Unity Catalog.
• Under Enable Unity Catalog, select Enable.
• Select the region where you want to enable Unity Catalog for your workspace.
• Select the existing or create a new Unity Catalog metastore for your workspace region.
• Assign users and groups as needed.

The default storage account that Databricks creates includes a container called unity-catalog-storag.... A new storage account for a Unity Catalog metastore should be created for Unity Catalog4. The unity-catalogue-storage container is also used by some features of Databricks, such as Delta Lak....

I hope this information was helpful. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask me. 😊

[scott1]

Hello, thanks for the reply.

If I'm reading correctly, there is no way to set up automatic enablement of new workspaces in a region that already has a UC metastore, but rather we need to have an account admin manually enable unity catalog for the new workspaces and select the existing metastore in the region. Is that correct?