Product(s): Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
Overall Comment:"The unity catalog environment enables efficient governance and permissions management. At the core, the Delta Tables are very efficient for housing big data, and leveraging UC workflow jobs has easily modernized our company's approach to creating and engaging with data."
Unity Catalog is amazing for bundling multiple types of data like Delta tables, Models, Functions and Volumes for unstructured data. UC also enables simple connections to External Locations that can be configured for connecting to a cloud provider such as S3. Finally, the Workflows for jobs and pipelines is essential for optimizing runs of code in easy-to-manage objects.
On the downside, there is some complexity to enable all the features on External tables rather than the Managed tables by Databricks (which does not connect to external cloud data like S3). Also, there is some downsides to selecting the different types of Computes; there's the SQL Warehouses which have functionality that Clusters do not have. Similarly, certain Compute modes are restricted to being a Dedicated single-user cluster for accessing ML runtimes, but then only Standard mode clusters can engage with Shallow Clones properly.