When you connect to a foreign catalog, Wherobots acts as a client and data governance takes place at the data’s source.
With a foreign catalog you can mirror and manage data from external data systems within Wherobots.
- External Source of Truth: The external system (such as Unity Catalog) is the authoritative source for metadata. Wherobots does not own or control that metadata.
- Read-Only Connection: Wherobots reads metadata from the foreign catalog to understand available tables and schemas but does not write to that specific table or manage its lifecycle.
- No Data Discovery: The external system (e.g., Databricks Unity Catalog) is responsible for discovering data and keeping its own catalog up to date. Wherobots simply reflects the current state of that external catalog.
Benefits of Wherobots Data Federation
- Zero-Copy architecture: Read tables managed by external cloud providers, like Databricks, without moving or duplicating data.
- Secure federation: Set up access to an external data source once by creating a single, secure connection.
- Get a unified view of all your Organization’s data: All connected tables appear side-by-side in the Wherobots Data Hub. This allows your team to browse, query, and even join data from different sources as if it were all local, dramatically simplifying data discovery and analysis.
- Accelerated innovation on the lakehouse: Take spatial ideas to market faster using Wherobots’ 300+ spatial functions, raster inference, and compute for physical world data on your Unity Catalog data.