Unity Catalog: Open and Universal Governance for the Lakehouse and Beyond

Summary: Unity Catalog is an open-source, universal Lakehouse catalog delivering governance across tabular data, unstructured data, and AI models. Open-source since 2024, UC provides APIs and implementations, deployed in many environments with interop. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 7184
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.4028924e-05
Overall Rank: 8,605 | 40.97%
DOI: 10.1145/3722212.3724459

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ramesh Chandra (Databricks)
2. Haogang Chen (Databricks)
3. Ray Matharu (Databricks)
4. Sarah Cai (Databricks)
5. Jeff Chen (Databricks)
6. Priyam Dutta (Databricks)
7. Bogdan Ghita (Databricks)
8. Todd Greenstein (Databricks)
9. Gopal Holla (Databricks)
10. Peng Huang (Databricks)
11. Yuchen Huo (Databricks)
12. Adrian Ionescu (Databricks)
13. Adriana Ispas (Databricks)
14. Tim Januschowski (Databricks)
15. Vihang Karajgaonkar (Databricks)
16. Stefania Leone (Databricks)
17. David Lewis (Databricks)
18. Andrew Li (Databricks)
19. Nong Li (Databricks)
20. Cheng Lian (Databricks)
21. Stephen Link (Databricks)
22. Qing Lu (Databricks)
23. Yesheng Ma (Databricks)
24. Chris Pettitt (Databricks)
25. Vijayan Prabhakaran (Databricks)
26. Bogdan Raducanu (Databricks)
27. Kyle Rong (Databricks)
28. Paul Roome (Databricks)
29. Samarth Shetty (Databricks)
30. Sean Smith (Databricks)
31. Xiaotong Sun (Databricks)
32. Yuyuan Tang (Databricks)
33. Weitao Wen (Databricks)
34. Lei Xia (Databricks)
35. Junlin Zeng (Databricks)
36. Ben Zhang (Databricks)
37. Reynold Xin (Databricks)
38. Matei Zaharia (Databricks)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{chandra_sigmod25,
        title = {{Unity Catalog: Open and Universal Governance for the Lakehouse and Beyond}},
        author = {Chandra, Ramesh and Chen, Haogang and Matharu, Ray and Cai, Sarah and Chen, Jeff and Dutta, Priyam and Ghita, Bogdan and Greenstein, Todd and Holla, Gopal and Huang, Peng and Huo, Yuchen and Ionescu, Adrian and Ispas, Adriana and Januschowski, Tim and Karajgaonkar, Vihang and Leone, Stefania and Lewis, David and Li, Andrew and Li, Nong and Lian, Cheng and Link, Stephen and Lu, Qing and Ma, Yesheng and Pettitt, Chris and Prabhakaran, Vijayan and Raducanu, Bogdan and Rong, Kyle and Roome, Paul and Shetty, Samarth and Smith, Sean and Sun, Xiaotong and Tang, Yuyuan and Wen, Weitao and Xia, Lei and Zeng, Junlin and Zhang, Ben and Xin, Reynold and Zaharia, Matei},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '25},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3722212.3724459},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3722212.3724459},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,485	PTO: A Workload-driven Predictive Table Optimizer for Lakehouse Systems	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,536	Active Data Lakes: Regaining Physical Data Independence Without Losing Interoperability	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
13,329	Delta Sharing: An Open Protocol for Cross-Platform Data Sharing	2025	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
183	Applying Model Management to Classical Meta Data Problems	2003	CIDR	0.00026283359
237	Amazon Redshift and the Case for Simpler Data Warehouses	2015	SIGMOD	0.0002369895
476	The Making of TPC-DS	2006	VLDB	0.00017860667
506	Schema Mappings, Data Exchange, and Metadata Management	2005	PODS	0.0001728171
514	Goods: Organizing Google's Datasets	2016	SIGMOD	0.00017178673
520	Delta Lake: High-Performance ACID Table Storage over Cloud Object Stores	2020	VLDB	0.00017136828
749	Data Lake Management: Challenges and Opportunities	2019	VLDB	0.00014379989
1,138	Lakehouse: A New Generation of Open Platforms that Unify Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics	2021	CIDR	0.00012023643
1,902	Ground: A Data Context Service	2017	CIDR	9.506714e-05
2,913	Constance: An Intelligent Data Lake System	2016	SIGMOD	7.9684737e-05
3,555	Apache Hive: From MapReduce to Enterprise-grade Big Data Warehousing	2019	SIGMOD	7.3115321e-05
9,127	Databricks Lakeguard: Supporting Fine-grained Access Control and Multi-user Capabilities for Apache Spark Workloads	2025	SIGMOD	5.3189314e-05

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#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
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3	10,536	Active Data Lakes: Regaining Physical Data Independence Without Losing Interoperability	2026	VLDB
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8	1,138	Lakehouse: A New Generation of Open Platforms that Unify Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics	2021	CIDR
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