Hello,

Thanks for sharing your investigation.

You’re correct: you can’t immediately recreate the converted table as an external table on the same original path after dropping it. The Unity Catalog table object remains in a soft‑deleted state for 7 days and is only fully removed after that period, so the underlying path remains reserved for the SET MANAGED / UNSET MANAGED lifecycle (with a rollback window of up to 14 days).

During that window you must either:

• Use ALTER TABLE ... UNSET MANAGED to roll back to the original external table, or

• Create a new external table on a different path, or recreate it as a managed table instead.

You can find the official documentation here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/databricks/tables/convert-external-managed