Alex Jiang

Enterprises run on multiple data platforms — Unity Catalog, Snowflake, Lake Formation, BigQuery, and many others. PII may be tagged in one catalog, masked in another, and ignored in a third. Open table formats solved data portability, but governance metadata remains siloed inside each data platform. This talk explores how enterprises can unify governance across platforms using labels exchange: carrying governance tags, classifications, and business metadata across catalogs through Apache Iceberg REST Catalog APIs. We'll cover why cross-platform governance is becoming the next federated data pain point, what's emerging in the Apache Iceberg ecosystem, and how teams can operate multi-platform architectures.

Enterprises managing data and AI assets across multiple tools and platforms often face fragmented governance, redundant data copies, and operational overhead. This session shows how Unity Catalog serves as a single governance layer for the open lakehouse by allowing every engine to access to the same data, with the same policies, without sacrificing performance or security. Through deep-dives, live demos, and an enterprise use case from General Motors, you'll see how organizations are using UC Open APIs to break down data silos and enforce consistent governance across their data estate. Whether you're evaluating multi-engine architectures or scaling governance across a large organization, you'll leave with practical learnings you can apply right away.

Open table formats such as Iceberg allow organizations to run multiple engines on shared data, but this openness makes governance difficult. Unity Catalog already supports universal table-level access control for external engines like Starburst via credential vending, but that alone cannot support fine-grained policies like column masking or row filtering. UC’s move to server-side scan planning, built on Iceberg REST Catalog Scan APIs, allows enforcement of fine-grained access control in Starburst: policies are defined and applied server-side, and Starburst uses the filtered scan plan from UC to respect them, with no bespoke policy logic. Starburst and Databricks share how they collaborated to bring fine-grained access control to Starburst on UC-managed Iceberg tables.