Request Access in Unity Catalog: A Self-Service Workflow

0:05Hey, today I have the pleasure to host Axel. Hi Axel. Hey you, how you doing? Thanks for having me. I'm Axel, social solution architect working at Databricks. And today we're together to show you the purpose of using request access. But first, let's see why uh the browse permission can be very important. So you have a nice data set for me. That was

0:28interesting. It's in Yousef Marini catalog, right? But I cannot see it. Yeah. And that's normal because whenever you create uh a catalog, by default it's secured, which means no one can query it unless the owner grant permission to a group of people. And that's why browse permission can be very interesting. Rather than limiting users from seeing

0:52the catalog, what you can do, you grant them the browse permission which allows them to view all the schemas, tables and the lineage and the um the metadata as well. But they won't have the permission to query this data and this will help them find the right asset and then they can request the access to the owner of the data. Now that I I have granted the

1:15permission to Excel. If he refreshes the data, he will be able to find my catalog. All right. So, I'm searching. I can see it here. It's grayed out. So, let's click on it. I see your catalog and I see some tables in it. Let's go into the Teemo schema. All right. I see Titanic. All right. I can see all the metadata. This is really interesting to me. But hey, I cannot see the data set,

1:40right? So let me ask you s for access. So we're going to request on Titanic select access. Please grant me access to this data set data set. I'll send it. So you will receive my request. Once Excel did request the permission I received an email. You can see the requesttor acceleration. That's the catalog the

2:04schema and the table. The permission is select and then I can just click on it. it will take me straight to the platform and then I have two options either add access to a group which has already access to this catalog or I can just grant the privilege to the principal. So as you can see those are the permissions he requested the select and it will it will automatically grant him the

2:27permission to use the catalog and use this use the schema. So I can confirm and now immediately Excel can now start querying the uh the data. So I can get on to my catalog and now simple data is available and yes I can see the data and query it. Yeah really easy simple

2:49process and for discovering the data and asking for for it. Exactly. And you can think about a data owner owning the privileges and he or she can receive the notifications either by Slack, by email or web hook. And by this you can let everyone see the data that you have within your catalog. But of course limit the access to only the people who need

3:11this data and you can control who has access and that's the beauty of using request access. Thank you Excel for being here today. It was a real pleasure. See you soon. Tiss.