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In the last seven days: 13 shipped, nine in preview, two with a date on it and six new concepts on Lakenaut.
24 changes for you: two needs action, 11 worth evaluating and 11 nice to know.
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New features |
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Curators can mark a Page certified or deprecated, and who may publish and manage Pages in a domain is now controlled by a dedicated MANAGE PAGES permission. |
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Starting on or after December 10, 2026, eligible workspaces with the compliance security profile will have external access to Unity Catalog managed Delta tables on by default. |
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When you create jobs compute in the UI, the access mode field now starts as Auto rather than Dedicated. |
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Users message the app directly or mention it in a channel or group chat to ask data questions without leaving the chat tool. |
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Genie Search indexes content from sources such as Google Drive, Jira, Confluence and Workday so Genie One can search it in one place. |
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Genie Ontology is the context layer that gives Genie One, Genie Code and other agents a business-aware map of an organization. |
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You look up its ID with SHOW VOLUMES DROPPED and restore it with UNDROP VOLUME WITH ID, which brings back its privileges and tags. |
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Teams in those workspaces can define and use features through Feature Views without first having it made available to them. |
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Context-based ingress rules can now name ChatGPT and Claude as partner platforms, with Databricks keeping their published IP ranges up to date so nobody has to track them by hand. |
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The customer is responsible for complying with the terms that apply to the model. |
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Admins can run ug configure --global from MDM software to set up the Claude desktop app machine-wide with governed models, MCP servers and skills. |
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As with other partner models, customers are responsible for complying with the model's applicable terms. |
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For a JDBC connection in Unity Catalog you can now name a Maven coordinate for the driver instead of uploading the jar to a volume. |
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Previews and beta |
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Agent authors can attach Unity Catalog volumes of PDFs, slides or images to a Genie Agent, which then answers across those files and governed tables in one conversation. |
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Protobuf requests to custom model serving endpoints can now mix numeric tensors with text and binary payloads such as images, audio or documents, sent as KServe v2 BYTES tensors. |
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UCDataset is a PyTorch data loader, in Beta on AI Runtime, that reads a Unity Catalog Delta table's files directly from cloud storage and splits the matching rows across all GPUs… |
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UCDataset reads rows from Unity Catalog tables straight into PyTorch training loops on AI Runtime, with no Spark or SQL warehouse. |
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It lets business users ask questions of their data, keep their threads and documents, and use Genie Agents from a desktop window rather than a browser tab. |
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A Chrome extension, installed from the Chrome Web Store and currently in Beta, replaces the new-tab page with Genie One for your workspace. |
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Dynamic value references in Lakeflow Jobs can now subtract or add a duration to a date before formatting it, for example passing the day before the run started to a task. |
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A Unity Catalog wiki lets a team write down what a table means, how it is meant to be used and where it comes from. |
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The REST API now lets an account admin bring back a deleted Unity Catalog metastore by its ID. |
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Deprecations and end of support |
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Move clients to the generally available system.ai.genie_one_mcp MCP behind Unity Gateway; tool names and arguments stay the same, OAuth clients request the ai-gateway scope. Action required, by 30 Nov 2026: Point MCP clients at the system.ai.genie_one_mcp Unity Gateway URL, switch the OAuth scope to ai-gateway, and grant EXECUTE on the MCP. |
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GLM 5.3 is the recommended replacement. Action required, by 4 Feb 2027: Move workloads that call GLM 5.2 to GLM 5.3 before the retirement date. |
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New and rewritten concepts |
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In a managed table Unity Catalog governs both metadata and files and deletes them on DROP; in an external table it governs only the metadata. |
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A row filter is a SQL UDF deciding which rows a user sees; a column mask transforms a value. Both attach with ALTER TABLE and tell groups apart with is_account_group_member. |
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The system catalog holds read-only tables that record cost, job runs, audit events, lineage, compute and query history for every workspace in a cloud region. |
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The human half of the Genie Ontology. Domains group assets by business purpose, Pages define what a business term actually means, and Genie prefers both over what it infers. |
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Unity Catalog captures table and column lineage automatically for queries on governed objects, filters the graph by your privileges. |
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A managed volume lives in the schema's managed storage and its files are purged after a 7-day window when dropped. |
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Curators can mark a Page certified or deprecated, and who may publish and manage Pages in a domain is now controlled by a dedicated MANAGE PAGES permission.
Agent authors can attach Unity Catalog volumes of PDFs, slides or images to a Genie Agent, which then answers across those files and governed tables in one conversation.
Move clients to the generally available system.ai.genie_one_mcp MCP behind Unity Gateway; tool names and arguments stay the same, OAuth clients request the ai-gateway scope. Action required, by 30 Nov 2026: Point MCP clients at the system.ai.genie_one_mcp Unity Gateway URL, switch the OAuth scope to ai-gateway, and grant EXECUTE on the MCP.
In a managed table Unity Catalog governs both metadata and files and deletes them on DROP; in an external table it governs only the metadata.