I have an external delta table in unity catalog (let's call it mycatalog.myschema.mytable) that only consists of a `_delta_log` directory that I create semi-manually, with the corresponding JSON files that define it. 

The JSON files point to parquet files that are not in the same directory as the `_delta_log`, but in a different one (can even be a different Azure storage account, I am in Azure Databricks)

As an example, the JSON could look like this: 

{
    "add": {
        "dataChange": true,
        "modificationTime": 1710850923000,
        "partitionValues": {},
        "path": "abfss://mycontainer@mystorageaccount.dfs.core.windows.net/somepath/somefile.snappy.parquet",
        "size": 12345,
        "stats": "{\"numRecords\":123}",
        "tags": {
            "INSERTION_TIME": "1710850923000000",
            "MAX_INSERTION_TIME": "1710850923000000",
            "MIN_INSERTION_TIME": "1710850923000000",
            "OPTIMIZE_TARGET_SIZE": "268435456"
        }
    }
}

When I try to read my delta table using spark.sql("SELECT * FROM mycatalog.myschema.mytable")` I get the following error:

RuntimeException: Couldn't initialize file system for path abfss://mycontainer@mystorageaccount.dfs.core.windows.net/somepath/somefile.snappy.parquet

which means Databricks is not trying to access that file using Unity external locations but the storage account key. 

The path is declared in a external location and I can access it normally with UC credentials using 
spark.read.load("abfss://mycontainer@mystorageaccount.dfs.core.windows.net/somepath/", format="delta")