If you use Databricks, you probably know that
Databricks Unity Catalog is the industry’s only unified and open governance solution for data and AI, built into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. With Unity Catalog, organizations can seamlessly govern both structured and unstructured data in any format, as well as machine learning models, notebooks, dashboards and files across any cloud or platform.
Unity Catalog delivers centralized data governance, fine-grained access control, streamlines data discovery and data lineage and automates auditing and compliance. Lakehouse governance is a critical element of an enterprise data strategy and Unity Catalog is a must-have for any enterprise that is using Databricks. This is such a clear and important message that sometimes some other features enabled by Unity Catalog get overlooked. Lets take some time and see how Unity Catalog can save you money.
Liquid Clustering
Liquid clustering provides significant performance advantages to large-scaled data analytic environments by reorganising data dynamically to optimize storage and query performance by continually analysing query patterns and data access frequency. Data that is access together is stored together, reducing the amount of data scanned. Data skipping, which involves ignoring irrelevant data, has significant performance and cost advantages. IT costs are also reduced since re-clustering had previously been a manual maintenance task. Manual partitioning and Z-ordering is also difficult, so it took up valuable time to probably not do the job very well. Liquid Clustering only requires Delta tables to be enabled. However, Unity Catalog reduces the size thresholds for clustering to be triggered. Unity Catalog also provides for predictive optimization, which will automatically trigger incremental clustering for UC managed tables rather than having to perform the OPTIMIZE task manually. The metadata gathered by Unity Catalog powers a more efficient layout in Liquid Clustering as well as improving overall query performance.
Enhanced Query Performance
Unity Catalog is well-known as a centralized metastore location in the context of governance. However, maintaining catalog-wide statistics can also improve query performance. Unity Catalog can provide more efficient execution plans since it maintains comprehensive metadata and statistics. Additionally, Unity Catalog’s metadata capabilities can assist in effectively managing partitions and indexes. A more efficient execution plan, better partitions and more effective indexes result in faster query times. Faster query times result in lower costs and an improved user experience.
Complex Workload Support
Data workloads scale in size and complexity in step with the growth and adoption of your lakehouse. Typically, this would result in increased maintenance and administrative workloads. However, Unity Catalog supports organising and isolating workloads within different schemas and catalogs. This isolation optimizes resource allocation and minimizes contention between different teams. This isolation and optimization minimizes the need for scaling additional resources beyond what would would be needed for the new workloads.
Multi-Region Data Management
One of Unity Catalog’s strongest governance capabilities is the seamless enablement of multi-cloud. A common use case for multi-cloud is business continuity and disaster recovery. Along with multi-cloud capability, you also get multi-region data management. Optimizing data placement and access patterns based on regional considerations can be reduce latency and improve overall performance.
Conclusion
Unity Catalog is an integral part of Databricks. If you have not migrated from the Hive Metastore yet, plan to do so. The security and governance features alone are mandatory for most companies and certainly for all regulated companies. However, the motivations don’t need to be all stick and no carrot. Every business that uses Databricks will likely see a cost benefit from liquid clustering and enhanced query performance. As these saving come for free; no administration is necessary. Companies with larger footprints may also see cost benefits from workload isolation. Finally, some companies may see a benefit in multi-region data management where such a strategy wasn’t even considered before because of the perceived complexity.
Get in touch with us for a free assessment and find out how internal expertise and custom accelerators can help you migrate to Unity Catalog.
