With the workspace deployed, connect your data so you can query it. This has two parts: granting the engine access to your storage, and registering a catalog in the Compute Plane.
Grant data access
The In-VPC engine reads your data through Azure Workload Identity. The workspace’s engine service account is federated with a Managed Identity that holds Storage Blob Data Contributor on the metadata account (configured during deployment). To query a data lake, grant that same identity Storage Blob Data Reader on each storage account that holds data you want to read. For data in a different Azure tenant, use the cross-tenant pattern (Tenant ID, Client ID, Storage Account Name) when registering the catalog.
Register the catalog
- Open the workspace’s Compute Plane and go to the Catalogs section.
- Select Create Catalog and choose your Catalog Type - Hive Metastore, Databricks Unity, Microsoft Fabric, Apache Polaris, or Iceberg REST.
- Provide the connection details. For cross-tenant data, enable Cross-Account Connection and supply the Tenant ID, Client ID, and Storage Account Name.
- Select Test Connection, choose the schemas to include, and select Create Catalog.
For the full set of catalog types and their settings, see Catalogs.
Next step
Continue to Create a cluster. Last modified on September 29, 2026
