Cross-project governance gives Copilot awareness of objects and standards across every project in your account, not just the current one. This article covers how cross-project awareness works, how to promote a local entity to a global dimension, and how to use Copilot to spot and consolidate duplicate tables across domains.
Feature availability: Cross-project governance is planned for a future release. Until then, Copilot’s context is bounded to the current project. Global modeling is the best interim pattern for sharing objects across projects: see “Global Modeling” in the Help Center.
The problem cross-project governance solves
Data modeling teams that work across domains (customer, orders, supply chain, finance) usually end up with the same object modeled slightly differently in each domain. The country table is in three projects. Currency definitions differ by a column. Date dimensions are almost but not quite identical. Each team had a deadline and didn’t know the others had already built the thing.
Global modeling solves part of this. It lets you reference a shared object from another project. But it doesn’t solve the discovery problem: teams don’t know a global version exists, so they build their own.
Cross-project governance with Copilot closes that gap. When a user tries to create a new object, Copilot can check every project in the account (subject to their permissions) for a similar existing object and propose reuse instead of duplication.
How cross-project awareness works
Once the feature is active for your account:
- Copilot’s context expands to include metadata from every project the user has read access to.
- When you ask to create a new object, Copilot checks for similar existing objects first.
- When you ask a question about the model, Copilot can reference objects in other projects if they’re relevant.
- When you run bulk governance, Copilot can operate across multiple projects at once (with explicit permission).
Cross-project context is opt-in per prompt. You can run Copilot scoped to the current project only (the default) or explicitly widen the scope in your prompt.
Finding duplicates across projects
Typical prompts that leverage cross-project awareness:
- “Is there already a country table anywhere in our account?”: Copilot searches every project and lists matches.
- “Find all tables in our account that look like they represent customer information”: Copilot returns matches grouped by project, with similarity scores.
- “Before I build a product dimension here, check whether a similar one exists in another project”: Copilot searches and returns matches before creating anything.
Promoting a local object to a global dimension
Once you’ve identified an object that should be shared across projects, the promotion workflow is:
- Identify the canonical version: which existing table should be the source of truth. Choose based on completeness, accuracy, and which team will own it.
- Open the canonical object’s project.
- Mark the object as global: from the object’s properties panel, enable Global Reference.
- In each project where a duplicate existed, replace the local version with a reference to the global version.
- Decommission the local duplicates once downstream consumers have migrated.
Copilot can assist with step 4 via a prompt like “Replace the local country table with a reference to the global country dimension.” The proposal-and-approve flow applies. You review the changes before they land.
Cross-project standards validation
Beyond object-level consolidation, cross-project governance also supports standards validation across the account. Example prompts:
- “Find every project where the naming convention for fact tables isn’t FCT_.”
- “List every project where more than 10 percent of columns are missing descriptions.”
- “Identify projects that don’t have a PII tagging policy applied.”
Results are read-only (surfacing issues, not fixing them) but you can follow up with targeted bulk prompts in each flagged project.
Permissions and access
Cross-project search respects the user’s existing permissions:
- Copilot only searches projects the user has access to.
- Objects in projects the user cannot see are excluded from search results. Not just the object content, but the fact that the project exists.
- Administrators and alternative administrators who can see every project get account-wide cross-project awareness. End users see only what they’re authorized for.
Related articles
- Getting started with Copilot
- Reverse engineering a model with Copilot
- Bulk governance actions
- Global Modeling