POST_START

Creating and Managing Permanent Unity Catalog Views

I recently needed to create a permanent view in Unity Catalog to simplify access to customer data for my team. I decided to use the CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW command to define a view that selects specific columns from the customers table in the training.sales namespace.

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW training.sales.customer_view AS SELECT customer_id, customer_name, country FROM training.sales.customers;

I verified that the view was created successfully by checking the catalog state. I ran the SHOW VIEWS IN training.sales command to see if the new view appeared in the list of views.

SHOW VIEWS IN training.sales;

namespace	viewName	isTemporary
reporting	daily_sales	false

I noticed that the customer_view wasn’t listed, which made me think it might still be in the process of being created. I decided to check the metadata of the view to confirm its structure and ensure it was properly defined.

DESCRIBE TABLE training.sales.customer_view;

col_name	data_type	comment
customer_id	bigint	customer identifier
customer_name	string	customer display name
region	string	sales region

The description confirmed that the view included the customer_id, customer_name, and region columns, which matched my expectations. I then ran a query to fetch the data from the view and verify that it contained the correct information.

SELECT * FROM training.sales.customer_view;

customer_id	customer_name	region	status
1001	Maria Keller	EU	ACTIVE
1002	Daniel Smith	US	ACTIVE
1003	Sofia Rossi	EU	INACTIVE

The results were as expected, confirming that the view was functioning correctly and providing access to the relevant data. After verifying everything was working as intended, I decided to drop the view to clean up the catalog, just in case I needed to recreate it later or if it was no longer required.

DROP VIEW IF EXISTS training.sales.customer_view;

I now have a clear understanding of how to create and manage permanent views in Unity Catalog. This process has helped me streamline data access and maintain a clean, organized catalog environment for my team.