As of April 20th, 2026, BigLake is now called Lakehouse for Apache Iceberg. BigLake metastore is now called the Lakehouse runtime catalog. Lakehouse APIs, client libraries, CLI commands, and IAM names remain unchanged and still reference BigLake.
Troubleshoot borderless Lakehouse for Databricks Unity Catalog
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This page shows you how to resolve common issues when querying remote data in
Databricks Unity Catalog with borderless Lakehouse. For
general borderless Lakehouse troubleshooting (including
connectivity and routing over private interconnects), see
Troubleshoot borderless Lakehouse issues.
Tables are empty or not discovered during refresh
If the catalog background metadata refresh indicates success (such as Refresh successfully completed), but tables in the federated catalog do not appear or listing tables returns 0 items, check the following:
EXTERNAL USE SCHEMA privilege: Verify that the Databricks Service
Principal has been granted the EXTERNAL USE SCHEMA privilege on the target
schemas or catalog in Unity Catalog. Without this privilege, background
metadata refresh and credential vending for queries will fail.
External data access setting: Verify that External data access is
enabled on the Databricks Unity Catalog metastore.
External location: Verify that the Databricks Unity Catalog and tables
use an external storage location (such as Cloud Storage or Amazon S3)
rather than default storage.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2026-08-25 UTC."],[],[]]
