*Connect Genie to data using Lakehouse Federation, avoiding the delays of a "big bang" migration. *Leverage Unity Catalog as the source of truth for both federated and managed data, ensuring AI workloads are secure and production-ready. *Start querying data in natural language immediately. Optimize performance by upgrading to Unity Catalog managed tables.

Agentic AI has created demand for cross-source reasoning that didn't exist 12 months ago. Business users want to ask natural language questions such as "which marketing campaigns drove the most ROI last quarter?" and get instant insights from their data.

The problem is that enterprise data is frequently spread across multiple systems such as AWS Glue, Snowflake, Oracle, BigQuery, Postgres and sometimes locked in legacy proprietary formats where migrating everything to a single system could take months.

What if you don’t have to migrate the data and could still reason over your entire data estate? With Lakehouse Federation, Databricks connects directly to your existing sources, wherever they live, and brings them under a single governance layer in Unity Catalog. Permissions, lineage, and access controls work consistently across every connected system, so you get enterprise-grade security without rebuilding it source by source. Business users can then query that unified data in plain English through Genie, getting answers that span every connected platform without a single pipeline, copy, or migration step.

In this blog, we'll walk through how to set it up by connecting to an external source, syncing its metadata into Unity Catalog, and asking questions through Genie - all in minutes.

Lakehouse Federation allows users and AI agents to securely connect to an external source and govern it alongside your native data. This enables Genie to access your extended data estate on the fly without requiring a migration. Lakehouse Federation connects to over 20 of the most popular data platforms. As an example, let's walk through how easy it is to set up with AWS Glue.