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Accessing Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 from Azure Databricks

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Microsoft has announced the planned retirement of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 (formerly Azure Data Lake Store, also known as ADLS) and recommends all users migrate to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Databricks recommends upgrading to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 for best performance and new features.

There are two ways of accessing Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1:

  1. Pass your Microsoft Entra ID credentials, also known as credential passthrough.
  2. Use a service principal directly.

Access automatically with your Microsoft Entra ID credentials

You can authenticate automatically to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 from Azure Databricks clusters using the same Microsoft Entra ID identity that you use to log into Azure Databricks. When you enable your cluster for Microsoft Entra ID credential passthrough, commands that you run on that cluster will be able to read and write your data in Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 without requiring you to configure service principal credentials for access to storage.

For complete setup and usage instructions, see Access Azure Data Lake Storage using Microsoft Entra ID credential passthrough (legacy).

Create and grant permissions to service principal

If your selected access method requires a service principal with adequate permissions, and you do not have one, follow these steps:

  1. Create a Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) application and service principal that can access resources. Note the following properties:
    • application-id: An ID that uniquely identifies the client application.
    • directory-id: An ID that uniquely identifies the Microsoft Entra ID instance.
    • service-credential: A string that the application uses to prove its identity.
  2. Register the service principal, granting the correct role assignment, such as Contributor, on the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 account.

Access directly with Spark APIs using a service principal and OAuth 2.0

To read from your Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 account, you can configure Spark to use service credentials with the following snippet in your notebook:

spark.conf.set("fs.adl.oauth2.access.token.provider.type", "ClientCredential")
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.oauth2.client.id", "<application-id>")
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.oauth2.credential", dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name-for-service-credential>"))
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.oauth2.refresh.url", "https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id>/oauth2/token")

where

  • dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name>") retrieves your storage account access key that has been stored as a secret in a secret scope.

After you’ve set up your credentials, you can use standard Spark and Databricks APIs to access the resources. For example:

val df = spark.read.format("parquet").load("adl://<storage-resource>.azuredatalakestore.net/<directory-name>")

dbutils.fs.ls("adl://<storage-resource>.azuredatalakestore.net/<directory-name>")

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 provides directory level access control, so the service principal must have access to the directories that you want to read from as well as the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 resource.

Access through metastore

To access adl:// locations specified in the metastore, you must specify Hadoop credential configuration options as Spark options when you create the cluster by adding the spark.hadoop. prefix to the corresponding Hadoop configuration keys to propagate them to the Hadoop configurations used by the metastore:

spark.hadoop.fs.adl.oauth2.access.token.provider.type ClientCredential
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.oauth2.client.id <application-id>
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.oauth2.credential <service-credential>
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.oauth2.refresh.url https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id>/oauth2/token

Warning

  • These credentials are available to all users who access the cluster.

Mount Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 resource or folder

To mount an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 resource or a folder inside it, use the following command:

Python

configs = {"fs.adl.oauth2.access.token.provider.type": "ClientCredential",
          "fs.adl.oauth2.client.id": "<application-id>",
          "fs.adl.oauth2.credential": dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name-for-service-credential>"),
          "fs.adl.oauth2.refresh.url": "https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id>/oauth2/token"}

# Optionally, you can add <directory-name> to the source URI of your mount point.
dbutils.fs.mount(
  source = "adl://<storage-resource>.azuredatalakestore.net/<directory-name>",
  mount_point = "/mnt/<mount-name>",
  extra_configs = configs)

Scala

val configs = Map(
  "fs.adl.oauth2.access.token.provider.type" -> "ClientCredential",
  "fs.adl.oauth2.client.id" -> "<application-id>",
  "fs.adl.oauth2.credential" -> dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name-for-service-credential>"),
  "fs.adl.oauth2.refresh.url" -> "https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id>/oauth2/token")

// Optionally, you can add <directory-name> to the source URI of your mount point.
dbutils.fs.mount(
  source = "adl://<storage-resource>.azuredatalakestore.net/<directory-name>",
  mountPoint = "/mnt/<mount-name>",
  extraConfigs = configs)

where

  • <mount-name> is a DBFS path that represents where the Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 account or a folder inside it (specified in source) will be mounted in DBFS.
  • dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name>") retrieves your storage account access key that has been stored as a secret in a secret scope.

Access files in your container as if they were local files, for example:

Python

df = spark.read.format("text").load("/mnt/<mount-name>/....")
df = spark.read.format("text").load("dbfs:/mnt/<mount-name>/....")

Scala

val df = spark.read.format("text").load("/mnt/<mount-name>/....")
val df = spark.read.format("text").load("dbfs:/mnt/<mount-name>/....")

Set up service credentials for multiple accounts

You can set up service credentials for multiple Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 accounts for use within in a single Spark session by adding account.<account-name> to the configuration keys. For example, if you want to set up credentials for both the accounts to access adl://example1.azuredatalakestore.net and adl://example2.azuredatalakestore.net, you can do this as follows:

spark.conf.set("fs.adl.oauth2.access.token.provider.type", "ClientCredential")

spark.conf.set("fs.adl.account.example1.oauth2.client.id", "<application-id-example1>")
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.account.example1.oauth2.credential", dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name-for-service-credential-example1>"))
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.account.example1.oauth2.refresh.url", "https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id-example1>/oauth2/token")

spark.conf.set("fs.adl.account.example2.oauth2.client.id", "<application-id-example2>")
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.account.example2.oauth2.credential", dbutils.secrets.get(scope = "<scope-name>", key = "<key-name-for-service-credential-example2>"))
spark.conf.set("fs.adl.account.example2.oauth2.refresh.url", "https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id-example2>/oauth2/token")

This also works for the cluster Spark configuration:

spark.hadoop.fs.adl.oauth2.access.token.provider.type ClientCredential

spark.hadoop.fs.adl.account.example1.oauth2.client.id <application-id-example1>
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.account.example1.oauth2.credential <service-credential-example1>
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.account.example1.oauth2.refresh.url https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id-example1>/oauth2/token

spark.hadoop.fs.adl.account.example2.oauth2.client.id <application-id-example2>
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.account.example2.oauth2.credential <service-credential-example2>
spark.hadoop.fs.adl.account.example2.oauth2.refresh.url https://login.microsoftonline.com/<directory-id-example2>/oauth2/token

The following notebook demonstrates how to access Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 directly and with a mount.

ADLS Gen1 service principal notebook

Get notebook