[FEATURE]: Support Conditional Installation and Dynamic Tool Publishment

[ognis1205]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Problem statement

The current implementation of Unity Catalog MCP assumes execution in a Databricks-managed environment.
As a result, even when using OSS Unity Catalog, users are required to install databricks-sdk, which is unnecessary and causes failures during workspace client instantiation. This creates friction for OSS users and limits broader adoption of the MCP tool.

Proposed Solution

Introduce conditional installation for environment-specific dependencies. Modify the MCP server to dynamically adjust the list of published tools based on the installed packages (e.g., whether Databricks-specific clients are available). This way, the tool can work smoothly in both Databricks-managed and OSS environments without forcing unnecessary dependencies.

Additional Context

I would like to take on this issue myself if the proposal makes sense. If this makes sense, I’ll start working on this issue before #13.

[ognis1205]

@smurching What do you think?

[smurching]

@ognis1205 thanks for filing, I think it makes sense to provide a way to opt-out of databricks-sdk installation - that said, it should be the default in this repo, since the main target user in this repo is developers building on Databricks. BTW, this is one reason I think it's still valuable to have a UC OSS MCP server (also since Databricks UC does contain some features that are not yet available in open source, e.g. vector search index support)

[ognis1205]

BTW, this is one reason I think it's still valuable to have a UC OSS MCP server (also since Databricks UC does contain some features that are not yet available in open source, e.g. vector search index support)

@smurching For this point, let's have a discussion with @dennyglee on the MLFlow Slack or somewhere. Thanks for the reply!