topic Re: Create External Catalog when dbname has special characters in Data Engineering

Create External Catalog when dbname has special characters

micheloh — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:20:05 GMT

Hi experts,

I'm having a problem when trying to create an external catalog with my PostgreSQL database.

The connection is fine. But the database name that I want to connect has dashes and colon (eg. my-db-prod:all). When trying to connect with it, I always get the error

[DATA_SOURCE_OPTION_CONTAINS_INVALID_CHARACTERS] Option database must not be empty and should not contain invalid characters, query strings, or parameters. SQLSTATE: 42602

Is it has any way to create the catalog with this dbname? Unfortunately I cannot change the dbname.

Thanks.

Re: Create External Catalog when dbname has special characters

ziafazal — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:57:20 GMT

Hi @micheloh

You should try url-encoding your db(my-db-prod%3Aall)
Any reserved characters for URLs (for example, /, :, @, (, ), [, ], &, #, =, ?, and space) that appear in any part of the connection URL must be percent encoded. See RFC 3986 for details.

Re: Create External Catalog when dbname has special characters

Ashwin_DSA — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:03:35 GMT

Hi @micheloh,

From what we’ve seen, this is currently a limitation of Lakehouse Federation foreign catalog creation rather than a problem with the connection itself.

The PostgreSQL connection can succeed, but the database value used when creating the foreign catalog is still validated, and names containing special characters such as : can trigger the [DATA_SOURCE_OPTION_CONTAINS_INVALID_CHARACTERS] error. Unfortunately, quoting or escaping the database name does not currently get around that validation.

So if the source database name cannot be changed, there isn’t a supported way today to create a foreign catalog directly against that database name.

The practical workaround for now is to access the PostgreSQL database through JDBC from a notebook or job instead of using a foreign catalog.

Sorry, we don’t have a better answer here.

FYI. There was a similar question in the past, too.

If this answer resolves your question, could you mark it as “Accept as Solution”? That helps other users quickly find the correct fix.

Re: Create External Catalog when dbname has special characters

micheloh — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:20:22 GMT

unfortunately didn't work. As Ashwin_DSA said, probably I need to find another way to get the data from the postgreSQL

Re: Create External Catalog when dbname has special characters

micheloh — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:28:29 GMT

Thank you for the reply.

Well, I think there's no other way for now but create a function query using JDBC on a notebook. No problem with that. I was just trying to evade the work to complicate for final users to get the data as some tables are huge and the connection provided is limited (we're connecting with Query Service from Adobe Experience Platform and it has some limitations to query like time and processing as guardrails).

It's a good case to use genie though! 🙂

Thank you and regards,

micheloh