External Volume

External Volume is used to mount external object storage (Alibaba Cloud OSS, Tencent Cloud COS, Amazon S3), allowing Lakehouse to directly access files within using SQL without first copying data in.

Creating an External Volume

Prerequisite: Create a Storage Connection (storage authentication configuration) first.

-- Step 1: Create Storage Connection CREATE STORAGE CONNECTION my_oss_conn TYPE OSS access_id = 'LTAIxxxx' access_key = 'T8Gexxxx' ENDPOINT = 'oss-cn-hangzhou-internal.aliyuncs.com'; -- Step 2: Mount OSS path as External Volume CREATE EXTERNAL VOLUME my_oss_volume LOCATION 'oss://my-bucket/data/' USING CONNECTION my_oss_conn DIRECTORY = (ENABLE = TRUE, AUTO_REFRESH = TRUE) RECURSIVE = TRUE;

Main Operations

-- View files in the Volume SELECT * FROM DIRECTORY(VOLUME my_oss_volume); -- Query files directly (no import needed) SELECT * FROM VOLUME my_oss_volume USING PARQUET SUBDIRECTORY 'orders/2024/'; -- Import data into a table COPY INTO orders FROM VOLUME my_oss_volume USING CSV OPTIONS('header'='true'); -- Refresh the directory (after uploading new files) ALTER VOLUME my_oss_volume REFRESH;

Supported Cloud Storage

Cloud ProviderTypeNotes
Alibaba CloudOSSMust be in the same cloud as the Lakehouse instance
Tencent CloudCOSMust be in the same cloud as the Lakehouse instance
AmazonS3Must be in the same cloud as the Lakehouse instance