CREATE EXTERNAL LOCATION
Applies to: 
Databricks SQL Databricks Runtime 10.4 LTS and above Unity Catalog only
Creates an external location with the specified name. If a location with the same name already exists, an exception is thrown.
For how-to instructions, see Option 2: Create an external location using SQL.
Syntax
CREATE EXTERNAL LOCATION [IF NOT EXISTS] location_name
URL url_str
WITH (STORAGE CREDENTIAL credential_name)
[COMMENT comment]
Any object name that includes special characters, such as hyphens (-), must be surrounded by backticks (` `). Object names with underscores (_) don't require backticks. See Names and Examples.
Parameters
-
The name of the location to be created.
-
IF NOT EXISTS
Creates a location with the given name if it does not exist. If a location with the same name already exists, nothing will happen.
-
url_str
A
STRINGliteral with the location of the cloud storage described as an absolute URL. Must be surrounded by single quotes. -
The named credential used to connect to this location.
-
comment
An optional description for the location, or
NULL. The default isNULL.
Examples
-- Create a location accessed using the s3_remote_cred credential
> CREATE EXTERNAL LOCATION s3_remote URL 's3://us-east-1/location'
WITH (STORAGE CREDENTIAL s3_remote_cred)
COMMENT 'Default source for AWS exernal data';
Note the backticks (` `) around the external location and storage credential names in the following example. Backticks are required for object names that include special characters, such as hyphens (-). Object names with underscores (_), such as those in the previous example, don't require backticks. See Names.
-- Create a location accessed using the s3_remote_cred credential
> CREATE EXTERNAL LOCATION `s3-remote` URL 's3://us-east-1/location'
WITH (STORAGE CREDENTIAL `s3-remote-cred`)
COMMENT 'Default source for AWS exernal data';