READ FILES and WRITE FILES when using Hive Metastore

knawara
Contributor

Hello,

I'm confused about documentation on privilege types when using HMS.

The following page is supposed to talk about HMS

https://docs.databricks.com/sql/language-manual/sql-ref-privileges-hms.html

but it also mentions 

READ FILES

Query files directly using the storage credential or external location.

WRITE FILES

Directly COPY INTO files governed by the storage credential or external location.

If I understand correctly these (Storage Credential and External Location) only apply to Unity Catalog, as per this page:

https://docs.databricks.com/sql/language-manual/sql-ref-external-locations.html

Is this a mistake in a documentation or there is something more fundamental that I don't understand?