Announcing Workday Data Connect federation in Unity Catalog

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Summary

Zero-copy access to Workday data: The new Workday Data Connect connector (Beta) lets Unity Catalog read Workday's shared Iceberg tables directly from cloud storage without ingestion pipelines or duplicate data.

Governed and performant: Queries run on Databricks compute with Unity Catalog governance including catalog, schema, table-level permissions and lineage over live Workday HR and finance data.

Unlock workforce and financial insights with Genie: Use the new Workday Data Connect connector (Beta) to query current people and financial data in place, combine it with customer, market, and operational data already in Databricks, and enable Genie-powered natural-language exploration, real-time financial planning, workforce analytics, and AI on trusted, governed data.

We're excited to announce the publicly available Beta of the Workday Data Connect federation connector for Unity Catalog, built for data platform and analytics teams that need Workday HR and finance data alongside the rest of their enterprise data in Databricks. With Workday Data Connect now generally available, Databricks is bringing this new zero-copy capability to the Databricks Data + AI Platform. The release builds on our partnership announced at Workday Rising 2025 , where Databricks was named a Workday Data Cloud launch partner. With this release, Databricks is one of the first of Workday Data Cloud's launch Data & AI platform partners to make a native Workday Data Connect federation connector publicly available, extending Workday's zero-copy data access directly into the Databricks Data + AI Platform. Through Lakehouse Federation, data teams query HR and finance data in Workday Data Cloud directly from the Databricks Data + AI Platform without maintaining duplicate copies of data. Once this data is available through Unity Catalog, teams can use Databricks SQL, AI/BI, notebooks, and Genie to explore current Workday data alongside the rest of their enterprise data. This gives HR and finance teams a governed way to move from trusted data to timely answers and decisions. How Workday Data Connect federation works The connector gives administrators one compact path from Workday sharing to governed Databricks queries: A Workday administrator shares approved HR and finance tables through Workday Data Cloud and grants a Workday Integration System User read access. A Databricks administrator creates one OAuth connection and a foreign catalog in Unity Catalog. Unity Catalog resolves the foreign catalog metadata, and Databricks compute reads the corresponding data from Workday A Databricks administrator governs access to the foreign catalog through Unity Catalog’s robust table-level access controls. Users query the resulting catalog with standard SQL in Databricks or in natural-language with Genie.

This means you can: Access data without an ingestion pipeline: Discover and query shared Workday tables from Databricks. Access is read-only, so Workday remains the system of record for HR and finance data. Govern access through Unity Catalog: Apply catalog-, schema-, and table-level permissions and use the lineage and auditing available for the foreign catalog alongside other Unity Catalog assets. Run analysis in Databricks: Databricks reads the shared data directly from Workday’s managed object storage and executes the query, so teams can use Databricks SQL, AI/BI, notebooks, Genie, and downstream data and AI workloads with Workday data.

“The Databricks Workday Data Connect federation connector gives us a governed, zero-copy way to discover and catalog Workday data in Unity Catalog. By making current people and finance data readily accessible alongside the rest of our enterprise data, it’s helping us accelerate new analytics and AI use cases.” —Jonathan Rogers, Chief Information Officer, FactSet What you can build with governed Workday data Once Workday's people and money data is federated into Unity Catalog, you can combine it with the rest of your enterprise data without moving any of it: Explore Workday data with Genie: With Workday HR and finance data available in Unity Catalog, teams can use Genie to ask natural-language questions about workforce and financial trends.

Real-time financial planning: Unify Workday financial data with market, risk, or sales data in Databricks to power forecasting and scenario planning, and accelerate the close. Workforce analytics: Blend Workday workforce and talent data with operational metrics to understand which teams drive the most impact, and model retention and performance. AI and agents on trusted data: Feed governed, current Workday data into AI applications, models, and agents on Databricks without stale exports, no brittle custom integrations.

Because the data never leaves its source of truth and Unity Catalog governs every read, you get fresh, trusted data with the controls your HR and finance teams require. This helps organizations build enterprise AI on open, governed data while maintaining consistent access controls across analytics and AI workloads. Three ways to bring Workday data into Databricks Different teams need Workday data in different shapes: a durable copy for historical reporting, an on-demand lookup, or a governed live view for analytics. Databricks now offers three complementary paths, so you can pick the right one per use case instead of forcing everything through a single pipeline. Path How it works Data movement Best for Lakeflow Connect — Workday Reports, Workday HCM, and Workday Activity Logs Fully managed, incremental ingestion into Delta tables in Unity Catalog Data ingested into your lakehouse Durable copies, history tracking (SCD2), scheduled pipelines over custom reports and HCM modules Workday Data Connect federation (new, Beta) Federates Workday’s catalog into Unity Catalog; queries run on Databricks compute Zero copy, read in place from data pre-ingested in Workday Data Cloud Customers using Workday Data Cloud who want to federate Workday’s catalog into Unity Catalog and query the data in place. Live Data Query — JDBC connection On-demand queries issued to Workday Live Data Query through a Unity Catalog JDBC connection. But doesn't bring the underlying metadata into Unity Catalog Fetched at query time Real-time, ad-hoc lookups of Workday Data Cloud data.

All three are native to the platform: governed by...