


  
  <section id="working-with-external-tables">
<h1>Working with external tables<a class="headerlink" href="#working-with-external-tables" title="Link to this heading">¶</a></h1>
<p>These topics provide concepts as well as detailed instructions for using external tables. External tables reference data files located in a cloud storage (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Microsoft Azure) data lake. External tables store file-level metadata about the data files such as the file path, a version identifier, and partitioning information. This enables querying data stored in files in a data lake as if it were inside a database.</p>
<p><strong>Next Topics:</strong></p>
<div class="toctree-wrapper compound">
<ul>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="tables-external-intro">Introduction to external tables</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="tables-external-auto">Refreshing external tables automatically</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="tables-external-ts">Troubleshooting external tables</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="tables-external-hive">Integrating Apache Hive metastores with Snowflake</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</section>




Working with external tables¶