topic Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog? in Get Started Discussions

How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

Arnold_Souza — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 17:03:30 GMT

Hello,

I would like to change the Metastore location in Databricks Account Console. I have one metastore created that is in an undesired container/storage account. I could see that it's not possible to edit a metastore that is already created. I could also see that it's not possible to create a second metastore in the same Azure region. Well, does anyone know how to move this metastore to another storage account? I was wondering, if I simply move the container to a new Account via Az Copy and then delete and recreate the metatore in the new location, will it work?

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

Arnold_Souza — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 20:34:16 GMT

Hello @Retired_mod ,

Thank you for the reply.

As you can see in the image below, there is no step 6. I mean, there is no button to edit the storage path and include a new one.

Because of that, I was wondering: what if I copy the current container to the new Storage account I have, then I delete the current Metastore and recreated it with the new Storage Account address already populated with the contents of the old metastore. Will it work? I would bet the data will be there (tables) but I do not know about the governance side (Table access controls)

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

mohnishbhagde — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 18:45:30 GMT

Did you get a solution for this?

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

Joaquim — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 22:03:28 GMT

I would like to bump this thread as I am in a similar predicament. New to Databricks here and I have a dev and prod environment in one Databricks account. I created the dev metastore (with "dev" in its name) in the same region where my production metastore would also reside. Dev & prod live in the same region. So my understanding here (because I can't have the metastores in the same region) is that I would have to have dev and prod in separate regions. So I'm assuming that I'm in the same boat where I would need to move my current dev metastore bucket to a different region and am wondering if this would be possible.

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

ac0 — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 19:35:37 GMT

Bumping this thread as well.

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

Bakkie — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 12:07:20 GMT

Facing the same challenge. Any update on this?

The ADLS Gen 2 path seems rather definitive when setting up a metastore:

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

tushar55555 — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:20:31 GMT

any luck on this?

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

Bakkie — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:38:19 GMT

We ended up 1) deleting the metastore (which only contained catalogs/schemas/tables), 2) creating a new one in the desired storage account and 3) re-populating it by running all Delta Live Tables pipeline. All our underlying raw data is stored in another storage account in delta format. Our Tableau connection to the SQL warehouse remained intact due to the same naming.

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

TugrulA — Mon, 05 May 2025 13:22:21 GMT

Hey @Bakkie could you tell me how you’re repopulating this topic? I have a similar problem. I deleted an existing metastore and then created a new one with a specific path. Now all of my objects—catalogs and tables—are gone. The metadata still exists in the external Azure Storage location, but each parent folder has a random UUID. I can’t figure out which data corresponds to which table or object.

Re: How to move a metastore to a new Storage Account in unity catalog?

Bakkie — Thu, 08 May 2025 11:28:01 GMT

@TugrulA we repopulated our SQL warehouse by rerunning all Pipelines (Delta Live Tables) that read our raw data from an Azure storage account (different than the Metastore storage container) and write the bronze/silver/gold tables to the (new) Metastore storage container related to the Databricks Workspace. Hope this helps!