@stemill ,

The approach of overriding Spark configs to "side load" an Iceberg catalog is not officially supported (i.e., there is no guarantee that it will work and not corrupt your data).

I don't think it's possible to create a workspace without Unity Catalog now (it's anyways not recommended).

You can do it another way around:

• Write from Databricks to UC Iceberg managed tables;
• Enable Glue to UC Federation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lake-formation/latest/dg/catalog-federation-databricks.html
• Iceberg tables are accessible in Athena through Glue to UC Federation.

Hope it helps.

Best regards,