External tables are tables that are defined in the Databricks metastore using the information stored in a cloud object storage location. External tables do not manage the data, but provide a schema and a table name to query the data. To create an external table, you can use the CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE statement and specify the object storage path to the LOCATION clause. For example, to create an external table named ext_table on a Parquet file stored in S3, you can use the following statement:
SQL
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE ext_table (
col1 INT,
col2 STRING
)
STORED AS PARQUET
LOCATION 's3://bucket/path/file.parquet'
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