Unity Catalog External Locations: Extending Governance to OneLake and Beyond

Unity Catalog External Locations are how Databricks connects to storage. Users define a path to the storage, attach a credential, and UC governs everything built on top: managed tables, views and other assets. Currently, it supports S3, ADLS, GCS and Cloudflare R2.  We are expanding this functionality to include support for Microsoft OneLake.

In this session, we'll show how External Locations provide a consistent, extensible pattern for connecting Databricks to any storage platform — and walk through what it takes to create External Location for Microsoft OneLake. You'll see the architecture, the setup end-to-end, and a demo reading and writing UC-governed assets directly into OneLake storage without needing to setup any ETL pipelines.

We will close the session with what’s next: extending the same model to on-premise storage, so Unity Catalog becomes a single governance layer across your data estate.