Create a catalog and schema in Databricks Unity Catalog using SQL
domain: docs.databricks.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Open a Databricks notebook or SQL editor attached to a cluster with Unity Catalog enabled
Create the catalog: CREATE CATALOG IF NOT EXISTS my_catalog
Optionally set a managed storage location: CREATE CATALOG my_catalog MANAGED LOCATION 's3://my-bucket/my-catalog'
Switch context: USE CATALOG my_catalog
Create a schema: CREATE SCHEMA IF NOT EXISTS my_schema
Verify: SHOW SCHEMAS IN my_catalog
Known gotchas
Only metastore admins or users with the CREATE CATALOG privilege can create catalogs; account-level vs workspace-level permission boundaries are a common source of 'permission denied' errors
The default managed storage location for a catalog falls back to the metastore-level root storage if no MANAGED LOCATION is specified at catalog creation; changing this after creation requires data migration
Catalog and schema names in Unity Catalog are case-insensitive and must match the identifier rules; avoid using reserved words or special characters
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