Upgrading to Connections
Public preview
This feature is public preview and available to select accounts. Reach out to your Immuta support professional to enable it on your tenant.
Connections allow you to register your data objects in a technology through a single connection, making data registration more scalable for your organization. Instead of registering schema and databases individually, you can register them all at once and allow Immuta to monitor your data platform for changes so that data sources are added and removed automatically to reflect the state of data on your data platform.
Native integrations
Native integrations are now connections. Once the upgrade is complete, you will control most integration settings at the connection level via the Infrastructure tab in Immuta.
Integrations are set up from the Immuta app settings page or via the API. These integrations establish a relationship between Immuta and your data platform for policy orchestration. Then tables are registered as data sources through an additional step with separate credentials. Schemas and databases are not reflected in the UI.
Integrations and data sources are set up together with a single connection per account between Immuta and your data platform. Based on the privileges granted to the Immuta system user, metadata from databases, schemas, and tables is automatically pulled into Immuta and continuously monitored for any changes.
Supported technology and authorization methods
Snowflake
Snowflake OAuth
Username and password
Key pair
Databricks
Token
*M2M OAuth is not yet supported.
Unsupported technologies
The following technologies are not yet supported with connections:
Azure Synapse Analytics
Databricks Spark
Google BigQuery
Redshift
S3
Starburst (Trino)
Supported features
The tables below outline Immuta features, their availability with integrations, and their availability with connections.
Snowflake
User impersonation
Project workspaces
Snowflake lineage
Supported
Supported
Query audit
Supported
Supported
Tag ingestion
Supported
Supported
Databricks Unity Catalog
User impersonation
Not supported
Not supported
Project workspaces
Not supported
Not supported
Query audit
Supported
Supported
Tag ingestion
Supported
Supported
Catalog isolation support
Supported
Not supported
Data sources
There will be no policy downtime on your data sources while performing the upgrade.
Supported object types
The following object types are supported for data sources registered with connections. However, when applying read and write access policies to these data sources, the privileges granted by Immuta vary depending on the object type. See an outline of privileges granted by Immuta on Snowflake and Databricks Unity Catalog object types on the Subscription policy access types page.
Snowflake
Table
View
Materialized view
External table
Event table
Iceberg table
Dynamic table
Databricks Unity Catalog
Table
View
Materialized view
Streaming table
External table
Hierarchy
With connections, your data sources are ingested and presented to reflect the infrastructure hierarchy of your connected data platform. For example, this is what the new hierarchy will look like for a Snowflake connection:
Integration
Connection
-
Database
-
Schema
Data source
Data source (once activated, becomes available for policy enforcement)
Tags
Connections will not change any tags currently applied on your data sources.
Consideration
If you previously ingested data sources using the V2 /data endpoint this limitation applies to you.
The V2 /data endpoint allows users to register data sources and attach a tag automatically when the data sources are registered in Immuta.
The V2 /data endpoint is not supported with a connection, and there is no substitution for this behavior at this time. If you require default tags for newly onboarded data sources, please reach out to your Immuta support professional before upgrading.
Users and permissions
With integrations
APPLICATION_ADMIN
Configure integration
Integration
CREATE_DATA_SOURCE
Register tables
Data source
Data owner
Manage data sources
Data source
With connections
CREATE_DATA_SOURCE
Register the connection
Connection, database, schema, data source
GOVERNANCE
Manage all connection
Connection, database, schema, data source
Infrastructure admin
Manage a connection
Connection, database, schema, data source
Data owner
Manage data objects
Connection, database, schema, data source
Schema monitoring
Schema monitoring is renamed to object sync with connections, as it can also monitor for changes at database and connection level.
During object sync, Immuta crawls your connection to ingest metadata for every database, schema, and table that the Snowflake role or Databricks account credentials you provided during the configuration has access to. Upon completion of the upgrade, the tables' states depend on your previous schema monitoring settings:
If you had schema monitoring enabled on a schema: All tables from that schema will be registered in Immuta as active data sources.
If you had schema monitoring disabled on a schema: All tables from that schema (that were not already registered in Immuta) will be registered as inactive data sources. They are visible from the infrastructure view, but are not listed as data sources until they are activated.
After the initial upgrade, your connection is periodically crawled every 24 hours to keep your tables in Immuta in sync. Additionally, users can also manually crawl metadata via the UI or API.
Additional settings
Object sync provides additional controls compared to schema monitoring:
Object status: Connections, databases, schemas and tables can be marked active, which for tables make them appear as data sources, or inactive. These statuses are inherited to all lower objects by default, but that can be overridden. For example, if you make a database inactive, all schemas and tables within that database will also be inactive. However, if you want one of those tables to be a data source, you can manually activate it.
Activate new data objects: This setting controls what state new objects are registered as in Immuta when found by object sync.
Active: New data objects found by object sync will automatically be activated and tables will be registered as data sources.
Inactive: This is the default. New data objects found by object sync will be inactive.
Comparison
Name
Schema monitoring and column detection
Object sync
Where to turn on?
Enable (optionally) when configuring a data source
Enabled by default
Where to update the feature?
Enable or disable from the schema project
Object sync cannot be disabled
Default schedule
Every 24 hours
Every 24 hours
Can you adjust the default schedule?
No
No
Databricks Unity Catalog
Data sources with integrations, required users to manually create the schema monitoring job in Databricks. However, this job has been fully automated on data sources with connections, and this step is no longer necessary.
APIs
Consolidating integration setup and data source registration into a single connection significantly simplifies programmatic interaction with the Immuta APIs. Actions that used to be managed through multiple different endpoints can now be achieved through one simple and standardized one. As a result, multiple API endpoints are blocked once a user has upgraded their connection.
All blocked APIs will send an error indicating "400 Bad Request - [...]. Use the /data endpoint." This error indicates that you will need to update your processes that are calling the Immuta APIs to leverage the new /data endpoint instead. For details, see the API changes page.
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