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Metastore Admins

You'll configure metastore admin ownership and move UC assets to the right group in ~10 min.

Prereqs: Add Groups

Why this matters​

Never let one person own the metastore. The metastore is the top-level Unity Catalog container, and whoever owns it controls catalog creation, external locations, and storage credentials. Tie that to a single user or service principal and you have built a single point of failure: the person leaves or the principal gets deleted, and your governance operations stop. Hand ownership to a group instead and the role survives any one departure.

Journey checklist​

  • Get started.
  • Before you start.
  • Infra setup
    • Create workspaces.
    • Add users.
    • Add groups.
    • Change ownership to metastore admins.
    • Activate SSO.
  • Cost monitoring.
  • Data Governance Strategy.
  • Access your data.
  • Build the first pipeline.
  • Automation and orchestration.
  • Query and explore.
  • Databricks AI/BI.
  • Business semantics.

How it works​

By default, the person who created the metastore owns it. That is almost never who you want owning it long term. Two steps fix it: point ownership at a dedicated admin group, then move the assets that individual already created over to the same group.

What you'll configure​

  • Set admin group: move metastore ownership from an individual to the admin group.
  • UC assets ownership: reassign existing catalogs, external locations, and credentials to that group.

Next​