Meagan Longoria adds external tables and views to an Azure Databricks Unity Catalog:
I’ve been busy defining objects in my Unity Catalog metastore to create a secure exploratory environment for analysts and data scientists. I’ve found a lack of examples for doing this in Azure with file types other than delta (maybe you’re reading this in the future and this is no longer a problem, but it was when I wrote this). So I wanted to get some more examples out there in case it helps others.
I’m not storing any data in Databricks – I’m leaving my data in the data lake and using Unity Catalog to put a tabular schema on top of it (hence the use of external tables vs managed tables. In order to reference an ADLS account, you need to define a storage credential and an external location.
Read on for examples of what you can do with this.