Introduction
Mortar is access governance for Databricks Unity Catalog. It continuously maps who can reach what across your workspaces, flags the access that shouldn't exist, runs your access reviews and certification campaigns, and produces audit-ready evidence.
It reads access metadata only - grants, group memberships, ACLs. It never reads the contents of your tables.
The problem
Databricks access sprawls faster than anyone can track by hand. A user inherits
a table through three nested groups. A service principal keeps ALL_PRIVILEGES
on a catalog nobody has queried in six months. A quarterly access review is an
engineer and an afternoon of SQL against system tables, repeated for every
catalog, every quarter.
The Databricks console answers "who has a grant on this one object." It does not answer the questions governance actually asks:
- Who can effectively reach this table, through every group path, direct or inherited?
- Which of that access is risky, unused, or over-scoped?
- What changed since last week, and who changed it?
- Can I prove we reviewed it?
How Mortar is different
- Effective access, resolved. Type a principal or a table and Mortar computes the full transitive reach - the join the console won't render. See Effective access.
- Risk judgment, not just inventory. Mortar classifies findings by severity, dampens dormant-catalog noise, and folds duplicate findings across a shared metastore, so you get a worklist instead of a data dump.
- Governance over time. Drift detection, a posture score with history, finding lifecycle and MTTR, and a tamper-evident audit log.
- It can't become your biggest risk. Mortar executes changes as the human who approved them, never through a god-mode service principal. See How changes execute and Security & trust.
Where to start
New to Mortar? Getting started walks you from connecting a Databricks account to reading effective access in a few minutes.