External tables

Applies to: ✅ Microsoft Fabric ✅ Azure Data Explorer ✅ Azure Monitor ✅ Microsoft Sentinel

An external table is a schema entity that references data stored external to a Kusto database.

Similar to tables, an external table has a well-defined schema (an ordered list of column name and data type pairs).

Unlike tables where data is ingested into your cluster, external tables operate on data stored and managed outside your cluster.

Supported external data stores are:

• Files stored in Azure Blob Storage or in Azure Data Lake. Most commonly the data is stored in some standard format such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, AVRO, etc. For the list of supported formats, refer to supported formats.
• SQL table (SQL Server, MySql, PostgreSql, and Cosmos DB).

See the following ways of creating external tables:

• Create or alter Azure Blob Storage/ADLS external tables
• Create or alter delta external tables
• Create and alter SQL external tables

• Create external table using Azure Data Explorer web UI Wizard

An external table can be referenced by its name using the external_table() function.

Use the following commands to manage external tables:

• .drop external table
• .show external tables
• .show external table schema

For more information about how to query external tables, and ingested and uningested data, see Query data in Azure Data Lake using Azure Data Explorer.

To accelerate queries over external delta tables, see Query acceleration policy.

Note

• The maximum limit of external tables per database is 1,000.
• External table names are case-sensitive, and can't overlap with Kusto table names. For more information, see Identifier naming rules.
• Azure Data Explorer supports export and continuous export to an external table.
• Data purge isn't applied on external tables. Records are never deleted from external tables.
• Row level security policy can't be configured on external tables.