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✅ What Is a Service Principal in Databricks?

A service principal in Databricks represents a non-human identity — like an application, automation tool, or CI/CD pipeline — used to securely access Databricks resources without using a personal user account.

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🔧 Common Use Cases with Examples

Use Case	Example	Why Use a Service Principal?
🔁 Automated Jobs	A data pipeline in Azure Data Factory (ADF) triggering a Databricks job	To allow ADF to authenticate to Databricks securely without hardcoding credentials
🚀 CI/CD Deployments	GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps pushing notebooks, jobs, clusters using REST APIs	To allow CI/CD tools to deploy infrastructure to Databricks securely and reproducibly
📦 Data Ingestion	A Kafka consumer pushing real-time data into Delta Lake	So the ingestion tool (not a person) can write to Databricks securely
📊 Power BI / Reporting Tools	Power BI connecting to a SQL Warehouse using OAuth via a service principal	For secure and auditable access to query data without personal credentials
🔐 Unity Catalog Permissions	Assigning roles and access to tables, volumes, schemas	So that tools like Airflow, ADF, or APIs can read/write data under controlled permissions
🛡️ Auditing & Security	Keeping audit logs clean by separating human vs automation identities	Improves security visibility and compliance tracking

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✅ How to Create and Use One (Summary)

1. Register an app in Azure Active Directory.
2. Create a secret or certificate.
3. Assign that app as a service principal in Databricks via Admin Console.
4. Grant it permissions on:
   • Clusters
   • Jobs
   • Catalog objects (via Unity Catalog)
5. Use the token/secret to authenticate in automation (e.g., via REST API).

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🔐 Bonus: Sample Python Usage with Token

import requests

token = "Bearer <sp-access-token>"
workspace_url = "https://<your-workspace>.azuredatabricks.net"

response = requests.get(
    f"{workspace_url}/api/2.0/clusters/list",
    headers={"Authorization": token}
)

print(response.json())

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