The Scenario
You are a data governance lead. The compliance auditor is coming in two weeks, and she has asked for a complete inventory of every table in your Databricks Unity Catalog — table name, schema, catalog, owner, and creation date — exported into a spreadsheet she can review and annotate offline.
Your organization has four catalogs and somewhere north of 600 tables. Nobody has a clean list.
The bad version of this week:
- You ask a data engineer to run the catalog query for you
- The engineer is in the middle of a sprint and gets to it on Thursday
- The CSV arrives with inconsistent date formatting and missing owner fields on older tables
- You spend Friday afternoon cleaning columns and chasing down who owns the tables with blank owners
- You walk into the audit with a sheet that still has 40 unresolved gaps.
The clean version is one prompt, today.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet that reads the Databricks Unity Catalog API directly, so you do not have to wait for an engineer or touch a notebook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
List all tables across all schemas and catalogs in my Databricks Unity Catalog. Populate this sheet with catalog name, schema name, table name, owner, and created date. Sort by catalog name, then schema name, then table name. Put headers in row 1.
SheetXAI calls the Unity Catalog APIs, pages through all catalogs and schemas, and writes every table into the sheet. A few hundred rows in, you have what used to take a week.
What You Get
A Google Sheet with the full catalog inventory:
- Column A — catalog name
- Column B — schema name
- Column C — table name
- Column D — owner (principal or group name)
- Column E — created date
Sorted and ready to annotate. The auditor can add a "Reviewed" column herself and work through it at her own pace. You did not have to write a single line of SQL.
If you want to scope it to one catalog, say the production catalog only, tell SheetXAI. It filters at the API call level, not after the fact.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Unity Catalog inventories are rarely as clean as the query implies. SheetXAI handles the edge cases in the same prompt.
When older tables have blank owner fields
Tables migrated from the legacy Hive metastore often have no owner set. The auditor will flag every blank.
List all tables in my Databricks Unity Catalog with catalog name, schema name, table name, owner, and created date. Where owner is blank, write "UNASSIGNED" in column D and flag the row by writing "NEEDS OWNER" in column F. Sort by catalog name then table name.
When the auditor wants the production catalog separated from non-production
She needs to prioritize. She wants the production catalog on its own tab, everything else on a second tab.
List all tables from my Databricks Unity Catalog. Write tables where the catalog name is 'production' into the Production tab. Write all other tables into the All Catalogs tab. Use the same columns in both: catalog name, schema name, table name, owner, created date.
When you only want tables created or modified in the last 90 days
The auditor is focused on recent changes, not the full historical inventory.
List tables from my Databricks Unity Catalog that were created or last modified in the last 90 days. Populate columns A through E with catalog name, schema name, table name, owner, and created date. Add a column F for last modified date. Sort by last modified date descending.
When you need the table inventory plus current permissions in one sheet
The auditor did not just want the list. She wants to see, for each table, who has what privileges — all in one view.
List all tables in my Databricks Unity Catalog and write catalog name, schema name, table name, and owner into columns A through D. Then for each table, fetch the effective permissions from Unity Catalog and append them as additional rows below each table entry, with principal and privilege in columns E and F, leaving columns A through D blank on permission rows. Add a blank separator row between each table block.
The pattern: the audit deliverable your team has been putting off for two quarters takes one afternoon, not one sprint.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Google Sheet, then ask it to pull your full Unity Catalog table inventory from Databricks. The Databricks integration is included in every plan. For related workflows, see how to audit Unity Catalog permissions or the Databricks in Google Sheets overview.