Where To Get Assets For Unity

[Ernest Babin]

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If you own a lot of packages from the Asset StoreA growing library of free and commercial assets created by Unity and members of the community. Offers a wide variety of assets, from textures, models and animations to whole project examples, tutorials and Editor extensions. More info

See in Glossary, it might be difficult to find what you need on the My Assets list. The Asset Store provides tools to help organize and find what you need.

(A) Labels allow you to organize your packages from the Asset Store, like buckets that you put the assets into so you can find them again. You can also toggle between hiding and showing your packages from the Asset Store.

Built-in auditing and lineage: Unity Catalog automatically captures user-level audit logs that record access to your data. Unity Catalog also captures lineage data that tracks how data assets are created and used across all languages.

In Unity Catalog, all metadata is registered in a metastore. The hierarchy of database objects in any Unity Catalog metastore is divided into three levels, represented as a three-level namespace (catalog.schema.table-etc) when you reference tables, views, volumes, models, and functions.

The metastore is the top-level container for metadata in Unity Catalog. It registers metadata about data and AI assets and the permissions that govern access to them. For a workspace to use Unity Catalog, it must have a Unity Catalog metastore attached.

You should have one metastore for each region in which you have workspaces. Typically, a metastore is created automatically when you create a Databricks workspace in a region for the first time. For some older accounts, an account admin must create the metastore and assign the workspaces in that region to the metastore.

Catalogs are used to organize your data assets and are typically used as the top level in your data isolation scheme. Catalogs often mirror organizational units or software development lifecycle scopes. See What are catalogs in Databricks?.

Non-data securable objects, such as storage credentials and external locations, are used to managed your data governance model in Unity Catalog. These also live directly under the metastore. They are described in more detail in Other securable objects.

Schemas (also known as databases) contain tables, views, volumes, AI models, and functions. Schemas organize data and AI assets into logical categories that are more granular than catalogs. Typically a schema represents a single use case, project, or team sandbox. See What are schemas in Databricks?.

Volumes are logical volumes of unstructured, non-tabular data in cloud object storage. Volumes can be either managed, with Unity Catalog managing the full lifecycle and layout of the data in storage, or external, with Unity Catalog managing access to the data from within Databricks, but not managing access to the data in cloud storage from other clients. See What are Unity Catalog volumes? and Managed versus external tables and volumes.

Tables are collections of data organized by rows and columns. Tables can be either managed, with Unity Catalog managing the full lifecycle of the table, or external, with Unity Catalog managing access to the data from within Databricks, but not managing access to the data in cloud storage from other clients. See What is a table? and Managed versus external tables and volumes.

External locations, which contain a reference to a storage credential and a cloud storage path. External locations can be used to create external tables or to assign a managed storage location for managed tables and volumes. See Create an external location to connect cloud storage to Databricks, Data isolation using managed storage, and Specify a managed storage location in Unity Catalog.

Connections, which represent credentials that give read-only access to an external database in a database system like MySQL using Lakehouse Federation. See Lakehouse Federation and Unity Catalog and What is Lakehouse Federation.

You can grant and revoke access to securable objects at any level in the hierarchy, including the metastore itself. Access to an object implicitly grants the same access to all children of that object, unless access is revoked.

Unity Catalog operates on the principle of least privilege, where users have the minimum access they need to perform their required tasks. When a workspace is created, non-admin users have access only to the automatically-provisioned Workspace catalog, which makes this catalog a convenient place for users to try out the process of creating and accessing database objects in Unity Catalog. See Workspace catalog privileges.

Workspace admins and account admins have additional privileges by default. Metastore admin is an optional role, required if you want to manage table and volume storage at the metastore level, and convenient if you want to manage data centrally across multiple workspaces in a region. For more information, see Admin privileges in Unity Catalog and (Optional) Assign the metastore admin role.

Managed tables are fully managed by Unity Catalog, which means that Unity Catalog manages both the governance and the underlying data files for each managed table. Managed tables are stored in a Unity Catalog-managed location in your cloud storage. Managed tables always use the Delta Lake format. You can store managed tables at the metastore, catalog, or schema levels.

External volumes represent existing data in storage locations that are managed outside of Databricks, but registered in Unity Catalog to control and audit access from within Databricks. When you create an external volume in Databricks, you specify its location, which must be on a path that is defined in a Unity Catalog external location.

Unity Catalog gives the ability to configure storage locations at the metastore, catalog, or schema level to satisfy such requirements. The system evaluates the hierarchy of storage locations from schema to catalog to metastore.

By default, catalog owners (and metastore admins, if they are defined for the account) can make a catalog accessible to users in multiple workspaces attached to the same Unity Catalog metastore. If you use workspaces to isolate user data access, however, you might want to limit catalog access to specific workspaces in your account, to ensure that certain kinds of data are processed only in those workspaces. You might want separate production and development workspaces, for example, or a separate workspace for processing personal data. This is known as workspace-catalog binding. See Limit catalog access to specific workspaces.

For increased data isolation, you can also bind cloud storage access to specific workspaces. See (Optional) Assign a storage credential to specific workspaces and (Optional) Assign an external location to specific workspaces.

You can use Unity Catalog to capture runtime data lineage across queries in any language executed on a Databricks cluster or SQL warehouse. Lineage is captured down to the column level, and includes notebooks, workflows and dashboards related to the query. To learn more, see Capture and view data lineage using Unity Catalog.

Lakehouse Federation is the query federation platform for Databricks. The term query federation describes a collection of features that enable users and systems to run queries against multiple siloed data sources without needing to migrate all data to a unified system.

Delta Sharing is a secure data sharing platform that lets you share data and AI assets with users outside your organization, whether or not those users use Databricks. Although Delta Sharing is available as an open-source implementation, in Databricks it requires Unity Catalog to take full advantage of extended functionality. See Share data and AI assets securely using Delta Sharing.

Databricks Marketplace, an open forum for exchanging data products, is built on top of Delta Sharing, and as such, you must have a Unity Catalog-enabled workspace to be a Marketplace provider. See What is Databricks Marketplace?.

To use Unity Catalog, your Databricks workspace must be enabled for Unity Catalog, which means that the workspace is attached to a Unity Catalog metastore. All new workspaces are enabled for Unity Catalog automatically upon creation, but older workspaces might require that an account admin enable Unity Catalog manually. Whether or not your workspace was enabled for Unity Catalog automatically, the following steps are also required to get started with Unity Catalog:

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