How to crawl Databricks

Once you have configured the Databricks access permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and your Databricks instance. (If you are also using AWS PrivateLink or Azure Private Link for Databricks, you will need to set that up first, too.)

To crawl metadata from your Databricks instance, complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Databricks as your source:

1. In the top right corner of any screen, navigate to New and then click New Workflow.

2. From the list of packages, select Databricks Assets, and click Setup Workflow.

Provide credentials

To enter your Databricks credentials:

1. For Host enter the host, AWS PrivateLink endpoint, or Azure Private Link endpoint for your Databricks instance.
2. For Port enter the port number of your Databricks instance.
3. For Personal Access Token enter the access token you generated when setting up access.
4. For HTTP Path enter one of the following:
   • A path starting with /sql/1.0/warehouses to use the Databricks SQL warehouse.
   • A path starting with sql/protocolv1/o to use the Databricks interactive cluster.
5. Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Databricks using these details.
6. Once successful, at the bottom of the screen click Next.

Configure the connection

To complete the Databricks connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might want to use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
2. (Optional) To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
   🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, nobody will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
3. (Optional) To prevent users from querying any Databricks data, change Allow SQL Query to No.
4. (Optional) To prevent users from previewing any Databricks data, change Allow Data Preview to No.
5. (Optional) To prevent users from running large queries, change Max Row Limit or keep the default selection.
6. At the bottom of the screen, click the Next button to proceed.

Configure the crawler

Before running the Databricks crawler, you can further configure it.

You can override the defaults for any of these options:

• Change the extraction method under Extraction method (see options below).
• To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Metadata. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
• To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Metadata. (This will default to no assets if none are specified.)
• To have the crawler ignore tables and views based on a naming convention, specify a regular expression in the Exclude regex for tables & views field.

JDBC extraction method

The JDBC extraction method uses JDBC queries to extract metadata from your Databricks instance. This was the original extraction method provided by Databricks, and is still recommended.

REST API extraction method

The REST API extraction method uses Unity Catalog to extract metadata from your Databricks instance.

• This method is only supported by Unity Catalog-enabled workspaces.
• If you enable an existing workspace, you also need to upgrade your tables and views to Unity Catalog.

While REST APIs are used to extract metadata, JDBC queries are still used for querying purposes.

Run the crawler

To run the Databricks crawler, after completing the steps above:

1. To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.
2. You can either:
   • To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
   • To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets in Atlan's asset page! 🎉