MOUNT POINT CREATION IN DATABRICKS

Question

I am not able to create the mount point in Databricks, it is showing that Unity Catalog access cannot support mounts. How can I solve this issue? However, I am not able to change the data access either.

Answer 1

Hello Rajya Lakshmi Upendram,

Thank you for your question on the Microsoft Q&A portal! And many thanks to the community member for the clear and helpful response.

You're absolutely right when Unity Catalog (UC) is enabled in an Azure Databricks workspace, traditional DBFS mount points are no longer supported by design. This is to enforce centralized, secure, and governed access to external data through Unity Catalog’s external locations instead of legacy mount-based access.

To resolve this, you’ll need to shift from mounts to UC-managed external locations. This involves two main steps: First, create a storage credential in Unity Catalog tied to your Azure Data Lake Storage account using a managed identity (recommended) or service principal. Then, define an external location that maps to your specific container/path and reference that storage credential. Once set up, you can grant fine-grained privileges like READ FILES or WRITE FILES on the external location to users or groups using SQL.

The links shared in the community answer are valid and direct to the official Microsoft documentation:

• Create storage credentials
• Create external locations

Just to better tailor the guidance: Are you currently trying to access data that’s already in use via a mount, or setting up a new data source? And do you have admin or metastore admin privileges in your workspace to create storage credentials and external locations? Knowing this would help confirm the exact next steps for your scenario.

If this answers your query, do click UpVoteandYes` for was this answer helpful. And, if you have any further query do let us know.

Thanks

Pratyush

Answer 2

Hello Rajya !

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Learn Q&A.

With UC enabled, DBFS mounts don’t work and can’t be created and this is by design so you need to stop using mounts and switch to UC governed access.

What you can do is create a storage credential in UC that points to your ADLS Gen2 with either a service principal or managed identity.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/connect/unity-catalog/cloud-storage/storage-credentials

Then create an external location that maps a cloud path. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/connect/unity-catalog/cloud-storage/external-locations

and grant permissions so your team can read or write via UC:

-- As a UC admin / data steward
GRANT USE CATALOG ON CATALOG my_catalog TO `your-group`;
GRANT USE SCHEMA ON SCHEMA my_catalog.raw TO `your-group`;
GRANT READ FILES, WRITE FILES ON EXTERNAL LOCATION my_raw_loc TO `your-group`;