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New feature Beta

Tag automations

Tag automations is a Databricks data governance capability, introduced August 2026.

Rules that assign or remove governed tags on the Unity Catalog tables or volumes matching conditions you define, so tags keep up with data and metadata that keep changing.

  • You can write the rule by describing it to Genie in natural language, which makes this one of the few governance features you can argue your way into configuring.
  • Saving one does not run it: the first thing it does is a dry run that records everything it would have tagged, so you get to see the blast radius before it happens.
  • Among its intended uses is deprecating stale data, so Databricks now ships automation for marking things obsolete - a feature this site takes personally.

Limitations: One automation targets tables or volumes but not both, is scoped to a single catalog, matches at most 500 assets per run and can assign or remove at most 5 governed tags; recurring results usually land within 24 hours, and an automation's scope and action cannot be changed after it is created.

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Category
Data governance
Introduced
August 2026
Also known as
tag automation, automate tag assignment
Verified
2026-08-20

Sources

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