Unity Catalog 0.7.0 shipped native Iceberg REST support, and Databricks added Iceberg REGISTER and UNREGISTER.

Open-catalog work led the month. The open source Unity Catalog 0.7.0 release turned on native Apache Iceberg REST catalog support by default, so external engines could read, write and manage Iceberg tables. It also changed deletion behavior: dropping managed tables, volumes or models purged the underlying cloud storage files after a default seven-day delay [46]. Databricks said Unity Catalog was the first catalog to support the Iceberg REST spec for REGISTER and UNREGISTER, which let tables move between catalogs without copying data [30]. A community announcement covered managed tables that stay in customer-owned storage [39].

Governance reached further into AI and applications. Unity Gateway was shown routing tasks across models and governing agents alongside Unity Catalog [3][16]. Meta's ads MCP server arrived in Databricks Marketplace with access controlled through Unity Catalog and tool calls governed by Unity Gateway [66]. On-behalf-of-user authorization for Databricks Apps became generally available, combining API scopes with Unity Catalog permissions [61]. Multi-statement transactions for Delta and Iceberg tables became generally available with Unity Catalog governance [38], and AI Runtime became generally available with Unity Catalog controls built in [27].

Data could also reach Unity Catalog through new routes. Lakeflow Connect added managed connectors for Atlassian, SharePoint, Google Workspace, GitHub and AI providers, landing data directly in Unity Catalog [13]. A Workday Data Connect federation connector entered Beta [56]. Pipelines gained the ability to write to one managed table from several sources using flows [17]. Governed tag propagation appeared in Beta and drew community discussion [29][34].

SDK and tooling releases added Unity Catalog securable types for skills and agent services, a secrets field on connections, and model service securables [35][51][52][71]. Databricks CLI v1.20.0 removed the Terraform deployment engine for bundles [62]. Community threads covered migration problems [11], external location errors after metastore attachment [8], a tables-per-schema quota increase [23], a foreign catalog timezone mismatch [19], and deploying catalog objects through bundles [9].