Databricks Unity Catalog Migration Pilot

Pilots a Hive Metastore → Unity Catalog migration end to end: it audits which tables can migrate (and why the rest cannot), turns that audit into a dependency-ordered execution plan, traces UC's two-level permission model when access breaks, and picks an environment-isolation pattern for the one-metastore-per-region constraint.

Overview

The September 30, 2026 forcing function. Databricks is deprecating the legacy Hive Metastore. On the cutover date the hive_metastore catalog goes read-only — no new writes, no schema changes — and stays available only for read-through while you migrate. Everything that writes to HMS (jobs, DLT pipelines, dashboards, external BI) must be pointed at a Unity Catalog table before then, or it breaks. This is not optional and it is not fast: the blockers below (legacy storage schemes, DBFS-root managed data, DENY-based ACLs) each require a physical data move or a grant rewrite, so the work is measured in weeks, not an afternoon.