Unifying Governance Across Engines and Catalogs in the Open Lakehouse
Databricks, Thursday, September 10th, 2026
How open table formats and open APIs support one governance model across multiple query engines and catalogs.
Continuing a series on the open lakehouse, this post covers applying a single governance model across multiple query engines and catalogs.
The problem is concrete: organizations that adopted open table formats to avoid engine lock-in then discover that each engine enforces access control differently, so the same table has different effective permissions depending on how it is queried.
The article covers how open APIs and a unified catalog layer address that. Relevant to anyone whose lakehouse is genuinely multi-engine rather than nominally open.