What are volumes?

Volumes are Unity Catalog objects that govern access to non-tabular data. They provide a logical layer over cloud object storage so you can store, organize, and manage files with centralized governance.

For comprehensive documentation on volumes, see What are Unity Catalog volumes?.

Unity Catalog supports two types of volumes:

• Managed volumes: Databricks manages the lifecycle and cloud storage location
• External volumes: You control the cloud storage location and lifecycle

What can you do with Unity Catalog volumes?

You can perform file management operations with volumes using multiple interfaces and tools:

• Upload and download files through Catalog Explorer. See What is Catalog Explorer?
• Read and write data programmatically using Apache Spark, pandas, or SQL. See Programmatically work with files in volumes
• Manage files using dbutils.fs, magic commands, or bash shell commands. See Utility commands for files in volumes
• Create tables directly from files stored in volumes. See Create a table from data in a volume