fabric warehouse vs databricks unity catalog

[arkiboys2]

we are using ADF with databricks.

recently we have started thinking about migrating the databricks so that it is unity catalog enabled.

I am thinking if it is a good time to move to fabric and have our existing pipelines in fabric and use the existing databricks notebooks into fabric notebooks.

do you know if the functionality of the unity catalog can be used in fabric? for example, can the fabric warehouse databases or tables be assigned to AD roles, etc.?

thank you 

[Srisakthi · Accepted solution]

Hi @arkiboys2 

It depends on what kind of Unity Catalog functionality you are expecting?
Basically Fabric supports Row level security, Column level security and object level security. Also with Purview you can further govern your Fabric Ecosystem.

Let me know if you need more information

Thanks,

Srisakthi

[Anonymous]

Hi @arkiboys2 

The functionalities in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse are not exactly the same as those in Azure Databricks Unity Catalog. I am not sure if the features you are currently using in Databricks Unity Catalog can all find suitable alternatives in Fabric. 

For the security of Fabric warehouses, you can learn more from Security for data warehousing - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn. Basicly, you can use Fabric security (workspace roles, fabric item permissions) to manage user access and permissions to the entire warehouse. To manage more granular permissions within a specific warehouse, you can use standard T-SQL constructs to provide specific permissions to users.

However currently Fabric has some known limitations for warehouses and data pipelines. You might check the following documents to find out whether some functionalities that you are using are listed there. 

Data Warehouse Limitations - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Tables in data warehousing - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Data Factory limitations overview - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Hope this would be helpful. 

Additionally, Fabric now supports accessing Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly through the Mirrored Azure Databricks Catalog feature, which is currently in public preview. If you want to do integrations with the data from Databricks Unity Catalog and other experiences in Fabic (e.g. Power BI), you could try this new feature.

Best Regards,
Jing
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