Hey @faruk , great question. But the answer depends on your data's current state. Are you migrating from DBFS mount paths to UC tables, or do you already have Hive metastore tables that you're migrating to UC?

Check out dbxmetagen — a Databricks solution accelerator that helps generate metadata at scale using LLMs. Could help seed your metadata table faster.

External vs Managed tables — document which is which. It affects your governance model significantly. This matters for permissions, disaster recovery, and preventing accidental data loss.

• Managed = UC controls the lifecycle (drop table = data gone).
• External = you control storage (drop table = data stays).

On column mapping mode — if your schema is strict and you don't expect columns to be renamed or dropped, you don't need delta.columnMapping.mode = 'name'. Keep it as default. It's only worth enabling if you anticipate schema evolution (renames, drops).

A manual metadata table works well here. Build your own Delta table as a data dictionary — columns like catalog, schema, table_name, column_name, business_description, valid_values, owner, etc. This becomes your controlled source of truth.

Good to go?