What’s new with Unity Catalog at Data + AI Summit 2026

Summary

At Data + AI Summit 2026, Unity Catalog announcements position the catalog as a runtime governance layer for enterprise data and AI, organized around control, context, and choice. Control additions include Unity AI Gateway for governing models, agents, MCP services, skills, and tools; contextual service policies can allow, deny, or require approval for runtime actions, while budgets, hard caps, tracing, and guardrails address spend, investigation, and safety. Context additions include Glossary and Domains for business meaning and scoped asset organization, plus Metrics that standardize KPIs for SQL, BI tools, APIs, and agents; Genie Ontology is described as a continuously learned enterprise context layer. Choice additions span cross-cloud and cross-region addressability, managed disaster recovery, Delta and Iceberg interoperability, multimodal and geospatial types, and open sharing of data, AI assets, and applications across organizations.

Context

The source describes a shift from catalogs as systems of record to runtime decision-makers as agents query enterprise data, reason over it, and act through models, tools, and MCP servers. It frames enterprise governance around maintaining control over actions, providing shared business context to reduce hallucinations, and preserving choice across clouds, models, and data formats.

Approach / What changed

Unity Catalog is being extended with Unity AI Gateway, contextual and attribute-based policies, Governance Hub, role-based access control, Glossary, Domains, Metrics, and Genie Ontology. The announcements also add cross-cloud and cross-region addressability, managed disaster recovery, interoperability across Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, support for multimodal and geospatial data, and open sharing for data, AI assets, and applications.

Takeaways

• Unity AI Gateway registers models, MCP services, agents, and skills alongside data, and adds runtime policies, external-provider budgets, hard spend caps, unified tracing, and built-in guardrails.
• ABAC extensions include beta grant policies for models, upcoming identity and context attributes, and private-preview tag propagation from source tables and columns to downstream tables and views.
• Unity Catalog adds a four-level estate-wide namespace, external access to managed Delta tables, a FILE type for unstructured data, geospatial types, and OpenSharing capabilities for cross-cloud and multimodal collaboration.

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