Until recently, data that stayed on-premises was data that Databricks couldn't reach. If your analytics and AI workloads ran in Databricks, and your most valuable data lived on-prem, you had two options: build and maintain a replication pipeline to copy data into the cloud, or accept that certain datasets simply wouldn't participate in your cloud analytics.Both options carry real costs. But a third option now exists: Databricks querying on-premises data directly, with no copies and no pipelines, through the open Delta Sharing protocol embedded natively in MinIO AIStor.