DatabricksDan Zuckerberg, John Spencer, Kosta Bizetic, Katie CummiskeyAnnouncement
Databricks announced the public beta of a Workday Data Connect federation connector for Unity Catalog, enabling zero-copy queries of Workday HR and finance data directly from the Databricks Data and AI Platform without ingestion pipelines. Workday shares tables via an Iceberg REST catalog; Databricks creates a foreign catalog in Unity Catalog and reads data from Workday’s managed object storage, with Unity Catalog governing read-only access through table-level permissions, lineage, and auditing. Teams can query the federated data using Databricks SQL, AI/BI, notebooks, or Genie for natural-language questions about workforce and financial trends. The connector requires Databricks Runtime 19 or above and a workspace admin to enable it from the Previews page. The release builds on the Databricks-Workday partnership announced at Workday Rising 2025 and complements existing Lakeflow Connect and Live Data Query options.
Databricks and Workday announced a partnership at Workday Rising 2025, with Databricks as a Workday Data Cloud launch partner.
The connector uses Lakehouse Federation to query Workday Data Cloud data in place. Workday shares tables via an Iceberg REST catalog; Databricks creates a foreign catalog in Unity Catalog, performs OAuth token exchange, and reads data directly from Workday’s managed object storage without copying.
The Workday Data Connect federation connector enables zero-copy queries of Workday HR and finance data directly from Databricks without ingestion pipelines.
Unity Catalog governs access to federated Workday data with table-level permissions, lineage, and auditing, keeping Workday as the system of record.
Databricks offers three complementary paths for Workday data: Lakeflow Connect for durable copies, Data Connect federation for zero-copy analytics, and Live Data Query for real-time lookups.
No. Access is zero-copy and read-only, so Workday Data Cloud stays the system of record. If you need a durable copy with history tracking, use Lakeflow Connect instead.
Query federation sends SQL to an external database and runs it on that system's compute. Catalog federation gets table metadata from Workday's Iceberg REST catalog, and Databricks compute reads the data straight from Workday's managed object storage and runs the query itself.
There are three: Lakeflow Connect for managed ingestion, Workday Data Connect federation for zero-copy analytics, and Live Data Query through a JDBC connection for real-time lookups. All are governed by Unity Catalog.
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