What are the recommended architectures or best practices for harmonizing and enforcing governance policies (such as data masking and access controls) defined in Informatica across both Databricks and Power BI datasets running in Import mode?
What I can't find a clean answer for is how to keep those rules consistent across the stack:
- The rule is decided and approved in the governance catalog Informatica, by the business.
- It has to be enforced in Unity Catalog, so it applies to SQL, notebooks, dashboards and Genie.
- And it has to apply in Power BI, where our semantic models are Import mode — thousands of users, so DirectQuery isn't viable for us on cost and latency. Which means row filters and column masks defined in Unity Catalog don't reach the report consumer.
So today the same business rule risks being expressed more than once, by different teams, with no way to prove they say the same thing on a given date
My questions to anyone who has been through this:
- How do you get a policy that is authored in an external governance tool to land in Unity Catalog without that tool taking over permissions in your metastore?
- With Power BI in Import mode, how do you avoid re-implementing the same restriction in DAX? Is there a pattern better than maintaining a user-level entitlement table?
- How do you demonstrate to audit that both platforms are applying the same rule, rather than asserting it?
- And more generally: where do you draw the line between the governance catalog and Unity Catalog — who defines, who enforces?
