What are the privileges for volumes?

Privileges for volumes focus on working with files stored in cloud object storage.

Volumes introduce the following privileges:

See Unity Catalog privileges and securable objects.

Privileges required for volume operations

The following table lists the permissions required to work with volumes. Volumes rely on Unity Catalog, so you must be in a Unity Catalog-enabled workspace and use Unity Catalog-compatible compute to interact with volumes.

Operation

Ownership required?

Catalog permissions

Schema permissions

Volume permissions

External location permissions

Read or list files

No

USE CATALOG

USE SCHEMA

READ VOLUME

None

Create, delete, or update files

No

USE CATALOG

USE SCHEMA

READ VOLUME, WRITE VOLUME

None

Create managed volume

No

USE CATALOG

USE SCHEMA, CREATE VOLUME

None

None

Create external volume

No

USE CATALOG

USE SCHEMA, CREATE VOLUME

None

CREATE EXTERNAL VOLUME

Drop a volume

Yes

USE CATALOG

USE SCHEMA

None

None

Manage volume privileges

Yes

USE CATALOG

USE SCHEMA

None

None

Note

Owners automatically get all privileges for a volume, and you can set privileges such as READ VOLUME and WRITE VOLUME at the catalog or schema level to cascade privileges to all contained volumes.

Volume ownership and MANAGE privileges

You must be the owner or have the MANAGE privilege on the volume to complete the following operations:

  • Manage volume privileges.

  • Drop the volume.

  • Rename the volume.

  • Change volume ownership.

Each object in Unity Catalog can only have one principal assigned as an owner, and while ownership does not cascade (that is, the owner of a catalog does not automatically become the owner of all objects in that catalog), the privileges associated with ownership apply to all objects contained within an object.

This means that for Unity Catalog volumes, the following principals can manage volume privileges:

  • The owner of the parent catalog.

  • The owner of the parent schema.

  • The owner of the volume.

  • Users with the MANAGE privilege on the volume, its parent schema, or its parent catalog.

While each object can only have a single owner, Databricks recommends assigning ownership for most objects to a group rather than an individual user. Initial ownership for any object is assigned to the user who creates that object. The MANAGE privilege can be granted to multiple principals. See Manage Unity Catalog object ownership.