Automatic governed tag propagation in Unity Catalog

Tag propagation copies governed tags from source tables and columns to new derived objects when supported operations run. This ensures classifications and attribute-based access control (ABAC) policies remain active on downstream data without manually tagging every new table or view.

Use cases

Imagine you build derived tables and views from sensitive sources and need security policies to follow the data without manual effort.

• Automatically apply governed and system tags to derived tables and columns.
• Ensure ABAC policies, such as column masks, apply immediately to downstream data.
• Resolve tag conflicts deterministically when multiple sources carry different tag values.

Limitations and requirements

• This feature is in Beta.
• Requires a workspace attached to a Unity Catalog metastore and governed tags enabled on the account.
• Supported operations must run on serverless compute; classic compute is not supported.
• A workspace admin must turn on the tag propagation preview from the Previews page.
• Supported only for the table securable type (including table-level and column-level tags), excluding volumes and Lakeflow streaming tables or materialized views.
• A single object can have a maximum of 50 tags, including propagated tags.