Lacking support for column-level select grants or attribute-based access control

Spencer_Kent
New Contributor III

In the Unity Catalog launch and its accompanying blog post, one of the primary selling points was a set of granular access control features that would at least partially eliminate the need to create a multitude of separate table views and the attendant complexity of managing this for a large set of users.

Beyond column-specific select grants:

GRANT SELECT(date, country) ON iot_events TO marketing

The launch also advertised a model for "attributed-based access control":

ALTER TABLE iot_events ADD ATTRIBUTE pii ON email
ALTER TABLE users ADD ATTRIBUTE pii ON phone
 
GRANT SELECT ON DATABASE iot_data
  HAVING ATTRIBUTE NOT IN (pii)
  TO product_managers

I can find no mention of these features in the Databricks documentation, where the only section on column-level permissions within the Unity Catalog section suggests we use old-school SQL views to achieve column-level permissions—exactly the kind of thing that Unity Catalog claimed to solve.

My own attempts to use these features in a Databricks workspace suggest that they are not yet available (even column-specific select grants!).

Am I missing something here? Is there a method for doing column-specific access control that doesn't require generating a new view?

mathan_pillai
Databricks Employee
Databricks Employee

Column-specific access without dynamic views is currently in private preview. You can work with Databricks accounts team to sign up for a private preview to get an early access. Once this is in GA, it will be generally available. Hope it clarifies.

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Spencer_Kent
New Contributor III

Simply amazing that 2 years on from the initial announcement, this feature is not available. You released Unity Catalog missing one of it's most-hyped features.

at-khatri
New Contributor II

is this feature still in private preview?

@at-khatri , Yes, Databricks has row-level filtering and column masking functionalities available, released last year.

https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/data-governance/unity-catalog/filters-and-masks/

Charuvil
Contributor