topic How to Read Shared Drive Data in Databricks in Data Engineering

How to Read Shared Drive Data in Databricks

Akshay_Petkar — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:04:48 GMT

Hi everyone,

I am working on a project where the data is stored on a Shared Drive. How can I read an Excel file from the Shared Drive into a Databricks notebook?

Thanks,

Re: How to Read Shared Drive Data in Databricks

BS_THE_ANALYST — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:37:32 GMT

@Akshay_Petkar , is the Shared Drive something like a Sharepoint Site's document library? It's not uncommon for businesses to sync these locally. If yes, then you can just use a Sharepoint Connector or build one.

If this is just a typical network drive, there's really no way to expose this directly to Databricks. However, if you leverage the Databricks SDK/CLI/API, then you could move that file programmatically from the Shared Drive into your Databricks environment 🙂. Once it's in your databricks environment, you can then read the excel file. If your IT team don't allow this, you can always propose an SFTP route instead.

I wrote a blog on getting data into databricks manually/programmatically, in here I used the CLI to move it from a file from my machine to my Databricks environment:
https://community.databricks.com/t5/community-articles/episode-1-getting-data-in-learning-databricks-one-brick-at-a/td-p/132759

And I wrote a blog on working with Excel files in Databricks:
https://community.databricks.com/t5/community-articles/episode-2-reading-excel-files-learning-databricks-one-brick-at-a/td-p/133192

If you don't know whether to use the CLI/SDK/API here's a great article to explain the differences: https://alexott.blogspot.com/2024/09/databricks-sdks-vs-cli-vs-rest-apis-vs.html

All the best,
BS

Re: How to Read Shared Drive Data in Databricks

szymon_dybczak — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:37:11 GMT

Hi @Akshay_Petkar ,

Could you provide more information. Share drive is pretty broad term. It could be Windows SMB / CIFS share , AWS FSx,, Google Shared Drive etc.

Re: How to Read Shared Drive Data in Databricks

Akshay_Petkar — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:52:45 GMT

Hi @szymon_dybczak ,

It is a Windows SMB / CIFS share.

Thanks,

Re: How to Read Shared Drive Data in Databricks

szymon_dybczak — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 07:03:26 GMT

Hi @Akshay_Petkar ,

File Shares are not natively supported in Databricks. Moreover, you need to ensure that you have a network connectivity between your cluster and a server your share resides. If your share is on-premises you need to configure all networking first (VNet injection of your workspace, configuring gateway etc).
Then you can write some python notebook to read data.

So, to put it simple - you can use Python code to read from a share.