Governance and Security

They are redacted (shown as [REDACTED]) to prevent accidental exposure of secret values in output.

A managed table's data lifecycle is owned by Databricks (dropping it deletes the data); an external table uses a specified LOCATION and dropping it leaves the underlying files.

A table whose data lives at a user-specified path outside the metastore-managed storage; created with CREATE TABLE ... LOCATION '<path>'.

Both the metadata and the underlying data files, which are stored in the metastore-managed (default) storage location governed by UC.

Only the metadata; the data files reside at a user-specified external LOCATION in cloud storage.

The table and its metadata are removed, and Unity Catalog deletes the underlying data files after the recovery period (7 days by default), during which UNDROP TABLE can restore it.