Introducing Cross-Engine ABAC
Databricks, Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026
Databricks announces Beta of cross-engine ABAC, enabling attribute-based access controls on external engines through Unity Catalog.
Databricks has announced the Beta release of cross-engine ABAC (attribute-based access controls), which enables enterprises to enforce fine-grained access policies across multiple data engines using the Iceberg REST Catalog APIs.
Unity Catalog now becomes the first catalog to deliver cross-engine ABAC enforcement, allowing tag-based row filters and column masks to be defined once and enforced everywhere, eliminating the need to duplicate policies across different engines.
The solution works by having engines send scan requests to Unity Catalog, which evaluates user entitlements and returns filtered data before it reaches the engine, requiring no policy logic in the engine itself. This addresses a critical pain point where organizations previously had to choose between duplicating policies manually, maintaining separate data copies, or accepting security risks with broader access grants.