Using Unity Catalog AI with the OpenAI SDK

Integrate Unity Catalog AI with OpenAI to directly use UC functions as tools in OpenAI interfaces. This guide covers installation, client setup, and examples to get started.

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Installation

To get started with the unitycatalog-openai integration, install the following packages from PyPI:

pip install unitycatalog-openai

Prerequisites

• Python version: Python 3.10 or higher is required.

Unity Catalog Server

Ensure that you have a functional UC server set up and that you are able to access the catalog and schema where defined functions are stored.

Databricks Unity Catalog

To interact with Databricks Unity Catalog, install the optional package dependency when installing the integration package:

pip install unitycatalog-openai[databricks]

Tutorial

Client Setup

Create an instance of the Functions Client

from unitycatalog.client import ApiClient, Configuration
from unitycatalog.ai.core.client import UnitycatalogFunctionClient

config = Configuration()
# This is the default address when starting a UnityCatalog server locally. Update this to the uri
# of your running UnityCatalog server.
config.host = "http://localhost:8080/api/2.1/unity-catalog"

# Create the UnityCatalog client
api_client = ApiClient(configuration=config)

# Use the UnityCatalog client to create an instance of the AI function client
client = UnitycatalogFunctionClient(api_client=api_client)

Client Setup - Databricks

Create an instance of the Unity Catalog Functions client

from unitycatalog.ai.core.databricks import DatabricksFunctionClient

client = DatabricksFunctionClient()

Creating a UC function

Create a Python function within Unity Catalog

CATALOG = "your_catalog"
SCHEMA = "your_schema"

func_name = f"{CATALOG}.{SCHEMA}.code_function"

def code_function(code: str) -> str:
    """
    Executes Python code.

    Args:
        code (str): The python code to execute.
    Returns:
        str: The result of the execution of the Python code.
    """
    import sys
    from io import StringIO
    stdout = StringIO()
    sys.stdout = stdout
    exec(code)
    return stdout.getvalue()

client.create_python_function(
    func=code_function,
    catalog=CATALOG,
    schema=SCHEMA
)

Creating a toolkit instance

Here we create an instance of our UC function as a toolkit, then verify that the tool is behaving properly by executing the function. OpenAI function calling allows a subset of their more recent models to accept external tool calling capabilities. Ensure that the model that you are selecting to interface with has the capability to accept tool definitions.

from unitycatalog.ai.openai.toolkit import UCFunctionToolkit

# Create a UCFunctionToolkit that includes the UC function
toolkit = UCFunctionToolkit(function_names=[func_name])

# Fetch the tools stored in the toolkit
tools = toolkit.tools
python_exec_tool = tools[0]

# Printing the tool definition will display the configured metadata for the instance.
print(python_exec_tool)

# Execute the tool directly
result = client.execute_function(function_name=func_name, parameters={"code": "print(1 + 1)"})
print(result.value)  # Outputs: 2

Send a tool-enabled question to OpenAI

With the client defined, we can now submit the tools along with our request to our defined OpenAI model.

import openai

messages = [
            {
                "role": "system",
                "content": "You are a helpful customer support assistant. Use the supplied tools to assist the user.",
            },
            {"role": "user", "content": "What is the result of 2**10?"},
        ]
response = openai.chat.completions.create(
                model="gpt-4o-mini",
                messages=messages,
                tools=tools,
            )
# check the model response
print(response)

After the response is returned from OpenAI, you will need to invoke the UC function call to generate the response answer back to OpenAI.

import json

# OpenAI will only send a single request per tool call
tool_call = response.choices[0].message.tool_calls[0]
# extract arguments that the UC function will need for its execution
arguments = json.loads(tool_call.function.arguments)

# execute the function based on the arguments
result = client.execute_function(func_name, arguments)
print(result.value)

Once the answer has been returned, you can construct the response payload for the subsequent call to OpenAI.

# Create a message containing the result of the function call
function_call_result_message = {
    "role": "tool",
    "content": json.dumps({"content": result.value}),
    "tool_call_id": tool_call.id,
}
assistant_message = response.choices[0].message.to_dict()
completion_payload = {
    "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
    "messages": [*messages, assistant_message, function_call_result_message],
}

# Generate final response
openai.chat.completions.create(
    model=completion_payload["model"], messages=completion_payload["messages"]
)

Utilities

To simplify the process of crafting the tool response, the ucai-openai package has a utility, generate_tool_call_messages, that will convert the ChatCompletion response message from OpenAI so that it can be used for response generation.

from unitycatalog.ai.openai.utils import generate_tool_call_messages

messages = generate_tool_call_messages(response=response, client=client)
print(messages)

Note: if the response contains multiple choice entries, you can pass the choice_index argument when calling generate_tool_call_messages to choose which choice entry to utilize. There is currently no support for processing multiple choice entries.