External Collection

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Everything you need to know about managing external collections.

Create an External Collection [READ MORE]

An external collection is a type of data collection in Zilliz Cloud that accesses data from external storage systems or database tables such as AWS S3 and Iceberg without copying it into Zilliz Cloud. It acts as a query layer over data lakes while maintaining compatibility with Zilliz Cloud query interfaces.

On Console [READ MORE]

This page covers how to manage an external collection via the Zilliz Cloud web console.

DQL sessions [READ MORE]

DQL operations in collections for on-demand computing, such as search, query, get, and hybrid search, require attaching compute resources from an on-demand cluster. Zilliz Cloud allows you to create a session to meet your on-demand compute needs.

Limits [READ MORE]

Because Zilliz Cloud does not store raw data for external collections and only maintains metadata and mappings to the external data source, external collections are read-only. As a result, you cannot perform write or maintenance operations from the Zilliz Cloud side, including `insert`, `upsert`, `delete`, `import`, `flush`, and `compact`.