Unity Catalog Skill | Agent Skills

Unity Catalog

Guidance for Unity Catalog system tables, volumes, and governance.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

Working with volumes (upload, download, list files in /Volumes/)
Querying lineage (table dependencies, column-level lineage)
Analyzing audit logs (who accessed what, permission changes)
Monitoring billing and usage (DBU consumption, cost analysis)
Tracking compute resources (cluster usage, warehouse metrics)
Reviewing job execution (run history, success rates, failures)
Analyzing query performance (slow queries, warehouse utilization)
Profiling data quality (data profiling, drift detection, metric tables)

Reference Files

| Topic | File | Description | |-------|------|-------------| | System Tables | 5-system-tables.md | Lineage, audit, billing, compute, jobs, query history | | Volumes | 6-volumes.md | Volume file operations, permissions, best practices | | Data Profiling | 7-data-profiling.md | Data profiling, drift detection, profile metrics |

Quick Start

Volume File Operations (MCP Tools)

| Tool | Usage | |------|-------| | list_volume_files | list_volume_files(volume_path="/Volumes/catalog/schema/volume/path/") | | get_volume_folder_details | get_volume_folder_details(volume_path="catalog/schema/volume/path", format="parquet") - schema, row counts, stats | | upload_to_volume | upload_to_volume(local_path="/tmp/data/*", volume_path="/Volumes/.../dest") | | download_from_volume | download_from_volume(volume_path="/Volumes/.../file.csv", local_path="/tmp/file.csv") | | create_volume_directory | create_volume_directory(volume_path="/Volumes/.../new_folder") |

Enable System Tables Access

-- Grant access to system tables
GRANT USE CATALOG ON CATALOG system TO `data_engineers`;
GRANT USE SCHEMA ON SCHEMA system.access TO `data_engineers`;
GRANT SELECT ON SCHEMA system.access TO `data_engineers`;

Common Queries

-- Table lineage: What tables feed into this table?
SELECT source_table_full_name, source_column_name
FROM system.access.table_lineage
WHERE target_table_full_name = 'catalog.schema.table'
  AND event_date >= current_date() - 7;

-- Audit: Recent permission changes
SELECT event_time, user_identity.email, action_name, request_params
FROM system.access.audit
WHERE action_name LIKE '%GRANT%' OR action_name LIKE '%REVOKE%'
ORDER BY event_time DESC
LIMIT 100;

-- Billing: DBU usage by workspace
SELECT workspace_id, sku_name, SUM(usage_quantity) AS total_dbus
FROM system.billing.usage
WHERE usage_date >= current_date() - 30
GROUP BY workspace_id, sku_name;

MCP Tool Integration

Use mcp__databricks__execute_sql for system table queries:

# Query lineage
mcp__databricks__execute_sql(
    sql_query="""
        SELECT source_table_full_name, target_table_full_name
        FROM system.access.table_lineage
        WHERE event_date >= current_date() - 7
    """,
    catalog="system"
)

Best Practices

Filter by date - System tables can be large; always use date filters
Use appropriate retention - Check your workspace's retention settings
Grant minimal access - System tables contain sensitive metadata
Schedule reports - Create scheduled queries for regular monitoring

Related Skills

databricks-spark-declarative-pipelines - for pipelines that write to Unity Catalog tables
databricks-jobs - for job execution data visible in system tables
databricks-synthetic-data-gen - for generating data stored in Unity Catalog Volumes
databricks-aibi-dashboards - for building dashboards on top of Unity Catalog data

Agent Skills: Unity Catalog

Install this agent skill to your local

Skill Files