External Table from volume

smpa01 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 17:48:32 GMT

I am experimenting to see if there is a way for me to create an external table from files written into unity catalog volume. I tried the following but it did not work.

# COMMAND ---------- # DBTITLE 1, Daily Fetch and Write # sample daily fetch from API call and write to <catlog>.<schema>.<volume>.<folder> data = [ { 'id':1, 'name':'John Doe', 'age':20 }, { 'id':2, 'name':'Jane Doe', 'age':30 } ] df = spark.createDataFrame(data) # write files to volume <Catalog>- workspace; <schema> db_bronze; <volume> volume; <folder> test_01 to store daily fetch from API df.write\ .format('delta')\ .mode('append')\ .option('mergeSchema','true')\ .clusterBy('id')\ .save('/Volumes/workspace/db_bronze/volume/test_01') # COMMAND ---------- # DBTITLE 2, Test Read from Volume # Reading successful location = 'dbfs:/Volumes/workspace/db_bronze/volume/test_01/' df = spark.read.format('delta').load(location) display(df) # COMMAND ---------- # DBTITLE 3, Create External Table %sql /*not successful*/ CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS workspace.db_bronze.people(id long,name string,age long) using DELTA location 'dbfs:/Volumes/workspace/db_bronze/volume/test_01/'

I am not sure what am I doing wrong here.

Re: External Table from volume

szymon_dybczak — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:52:09 GMT

Hi @smpa01 ,

Could you also attach what error did you get? And could you try removing dbfs from following part?

/*not successful*/ CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS workspace.db_bronze.people(id long,name string,age long) using DELTA location '/Volumes/workspace/db_bronze/volume/test_01/'

Re: External Table from volume

Pat — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 09:20:15 GMT

Hi @smpa01 ,

You cannot create external table on the data in volume:

see link to documentation: https://docs.databricks.com/gcp/en/volumes

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External Table from volume

Re: External Table from volume

Re: External Table from volume