I have images, zipped files, and arbitrary binary files in ADLS gen 2.

In Unity Catalog I created a storage credential and an external location to the container that contains these files in directories.

Is there any way I can view them within Unity Catalog without coercing them into a parquet file?

Also once the external location is created, I was also hoping I'd be able to simply read the files like:

```

with open('abfss://path/set/in/external/location/data.zarr') as f:

data = f.read()

```

I tried doing this: https://aboutdataai.com.au/tag/unity-catalog/ but get a 403 when I try to dbutils.fs.ls() the contents of the directory which I'm not sure why because I have granted access to myself for that external storage location.

I also was not open to directly open and read a text file in that same location and got the error the file doesn't exist.

Any help on this would be appreciated.

For those that want more detail, I am trying to work with unstructured data in a data lake using databricks. The 'mount' methods I'm told are being discouraged because they will be deprecated soon. So I'm trying to see how this new world of unity catalog behaves in relation to unstructured data. Unfortunately so far it certainly feels like the new changes have turned Delta Lake into Delta Warehouse.