Databricks

This is a working session, not a tour. By the end of it you will have a governed model of a Unity Catalog schema inside CoreModels, and you will have run your first drift audit against it - without installing anything in your workspace and without handing us a single credential. Everything CoreModels learns about your lakehouse arrives as JSON files you extract yourself from the Databricks SQL editor.

Reference articles usually show the happy path and gesture at the rest. This one is the full inventory: every HTTP route the CoreModels Databricks Unity Catalog connector answers on, the role each one enforces, the request and response bodies as they actually are, and - where a verb lives on one surface but not the other - an explicit statement of that fact rather than a diagram that implies otherwise.

"Has our Unity Catalog estate drifted from what we agreed it means?" is a question an AI agent can now answer with evidence instead of vibes. The same governance verbs that back the CoreModels HTTP API - status, audit, import, generate - are exposed as tools on our MCP server, so an agent can inspect a governed Databricks estate, audit a fresh extract against it, and draft the fix, all inside one conversation. This article walks that loop exactly as an agent drives it, with the real tool names and arguments, including the `artifactUrls` path for extracts too large to paste into a chat.

Somewhere in your lakehouse, a notebook is about to rebuild a table with a widened column type, and nothing will fail until a dashboard does - days later, in front of the wrong audience. The cheapest place to catch that is a pull request. This article turns the CoreModels schema audit into a merge-blocking CI gate for a Unity Catalog estate, then builds out the rest of the operational loop most drift setups forget: the status badge, the rolling history, the one-call re-audit for when the governed model itself changes, and the scheduled heartbeat that keeps watch between releases.

Take a single row of a Unity Catalog extract: