Governance on the lakehouse: ABAC, masking, governed tags, lineage, and Delta Sharing, locked down without grinding the data team to a halt.
Databricks MCP connectors for Genie One and Genie Code are GA, covering seven external tools governed through Unity Catalog and Unity Gateway with per-user OAuth and full audit logging.
Automatic change data feed (Auto CDF) GA shifts CDC from write time to query time. MERGE and UPDATE run 15% faster, but read costs move the other way.
Databricks ABAC context attributes are Unity Catalog row filter and column mask conditions that bind to the calling OAuth application. Shipped in Beta on August 21, 2026, they let you scope a policy to request.client_id so an agent querying on behalf of a user sees only that user's rows while direct workspace access stays unrestricted.
Unity AI Gateway is now GA, bringing centralized AI traffic control, provider routing, MCP governance, and cost monitoring under Unity Catalog.
Databricks RBAC lets users assume a role with only that role's permissions for the session, blocking accidental access to sensitive data through accumulated grants. The feature entered Public Preview on July 22, 2026.
Lakehouse Real-Time is a serverless SQL warehouse for sub-second reads against Unity Catalog tables. It targets thousands of concurrent users but only supports SELECT queries via the Statement Execution API, and it is in Beta.