UCM Setup Guide
- Brian Garland
What You Need to Get Started
To provision and run the assessment you will need:
Your Databrick’s user needs to be an authorized user in the workspaces you want to assess.
The workspace(s) you want to assess must have an attached Metastore
The workspace(s) you want to assess need to already be setup and provisioned in Lakehouse Optimizer by a Lakehouse Optimizer admin.
To run an assessment on a workspace, you do not have to be an Admin in the Lakehouse Optimizer, but if you are you can check on the Provisioning and permissions page in settings to see if everything is in place.
If your workspace says “Configuration Complete” then that workspace is fully provisioned in the Lakehouse Optimizer.
Under Workspace Permissions you will also see the item “Unity Catalog”.
If there is a check next to that, it means the Lakehouse Optimizer has detected the attached metastore in that workspace. So this workspace is all good to go.
Navigate to the Assessment Page
Access the assessment tool in the Lakehouse Optimizer by clicking the top icon on the left-hand side menu labeled “Unity Catalog Migration”.
The Lakehouse optimizer conveniently provides one location from which you can evaluate all your workspaces, but the assessment is run individually on each workspace, so start by selecting the workspace that you would like to run the assessment on first.
If the Assessment module has not been provisioned for this specific workspace you will see the message “LHO Unity Migration Module Not Provisioned,” and see the “Enable” button above it.
The assessment runs in the Lakehouse Optimizer and stores the results in the app's database, but some of the assessment features require access to a SQL Warehouse in the workspace. The provisioning step is just setting up which SQL Warehouse to utilize.
Click enable, and you can either select a pre-existing warehouse you have access to in the workspace, or if you have the Databricks permissions you can create a new SQL warehouse directly from this screen.
NOTE: Classic works just as well as Serverless, and any size warehouse will work fine. Utilizing a larger SQL Warehouse will not provide a noticeable difference in throughput.
If successful you should see a check next to “LHO Unity Migration Module enabled”, and you can see the metastore information along with any last run information, though that will be empty if no assessment run has ever been performed on this workspace.
Now we can go ahead a click the “Run” button. Each element of the report will populate as it becomes available, and you can view the progress of individual steps to see a breakdown of that is being worked on.
The amount of time the assessment takes will vary. A workspace with a handful of tables and items may take less than a minute, while a workspace with hundreds of thousands of tables, it will take hours or more likely days to fully run.
When the run is complete you will have a full hive metastore inventory for the workspace along with structured recommendations about what needs to be addressed to migrate the workspace to Unity Catalog and gauge the level of effort and investment that will be required to do so.
To learn more about how to best use and analyze the results included in the assessment please see our UCM Analysis Deepdive Guide.