Credentials

Applies to: check marked yes Databricks SQL check marked yes Databricks Runtime check marked yes Unity Catalog only

Unity Catalog and the built-in Databricks Hive metastore use default locations for managed tables. Unity Catalog introduces several new securable objects to grant privileges to external cloud services and data in cloud object storage.

Credential

A credential is a securable object representing a Google Cloud service account.

After a credential is created, access to it can be granted to principals (users and groups).

Storage credentials are primarily used to create external locations, which scope access to a specific storage path.

Credential names are unqualified and must be unique within the metastore.

Graphical Representation of relationships

The following diagram describes the relationship between:

  • storage credentials

  • external locations

  • external tables

  • storage paths

  • IAM entities

  • Azure service accounts

External location ER diagram

Examples

Using CLI create a storage credential my_storage_cred for a Google Cloud service account.

databricks storage-credentials create --json '{"name": "my_storage_cred", "databricks_gcp_service_account": {}}'

The rest of the commands can be run within SQL.

-- Grant access to the storage credential
> GRANT READ FILES ON STORAGE CREDENTIAL my_storage_cred TO ceo;

-- ceo can directly read from any storage path using my_storage_cred
> SELECT count(1) FROM `delta`.`gs://depts/finance/forecast/somefile` WITH (CREDENTIAL my__storage_cred);
  100
> SELECT count(1) FROM `delta`.`gs://depts/hr/employees` WITH (CREDENTIAL my__storage_cred);
  2017

-- Create an external location on specific path to which `my_storage_cred` has access
> CREATE EXTERNAL LOCATION finance_loc URL 'gs://depts/finance'
     WITH (CREDENTIAL my_storage_cred)
     COMMENT 'finance';