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Lake Formation Federation

A Unity Catalog connector can federate native tables to AWS Lake Formation, so a table created in Unity Catalog is also governed in Lake Formation. Use the Lake Formation Federation section.

Field Description
IRC principal The identity AWS Glue uses to read Unity Catalog: a service principal application ID, a user or a group. The connector grants it SELECT on each federated table, plus the USE CATALOG and USE SCHEMA it needs. Leave blank to turn federation off.
IRC principal type Service principal (default), User or Group.
Catalog federation region / Catalog federation catalog id For catalog federation only, where a Glue catalog reads this Unity Catalog. Set both, for example us-east-1 and 123456789012:uc_fed_catalog. Leave both blank for table federation, where each create event names its own target.

Federation is available on Self-Managed planes only, because it needs JWT event authentication. It also needs:

  • Event ingestion enabled for the connector, with Event API auth set to JWT.
  • The Runtime Plane's federation.uc-lf.enabled setting turned on. It is off by default.
  • A Lake Formation connector on the Runtime Plane that scans the target Glue catalog.

Tables that have Unity Catalog row filters or column masks are never federated, because Lake Formation consumers would read them unfiltered.