Volume

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DP-750

Each book explains Volume in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• General-purpose v1

  The older storage account kind (Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change.

• Unity Catalog

  Azure Databricks' governance solution covering both data and AI in one place, with centralised permissions, auditing, data discovery and lineage.

• Governance

  Keeping cloud deployments in line with an organisation's rules on technology, security and compliance, helped by Azure Policy, tags and resource locks.

• Catalog

  The first level of Unity Catalog's catalog.schema.table naming and the primary boundary for isolating data. Privileges granted on a catalog flow down to every schema and object it contains.

• Schema

  The middle part of a Unity Catalog name (catalog.schema.table), grouping tables, views, volumes, functions and models inside a catalog. A grant on it covers everything in it now and later, and nothing inside can be reached without USE SCHEMA.

• External

  API Management virtual network mode in which the gateway stays public but can call private back ends inside the VNet.

• CRUD

  Shorthand for create, read, update and delete, the four basic things you do with data. Data-plane roles in Azure Cosmos DB, for instance, authorise those operations on items.

Related terms

• Account driven user enrollment

  A way to bring a personally owned iPhone or iPad (iOS/iPadOS 15 or later) under management by signing in with a work account in Settings. Corporate data is kept on its own managed APFS volume, the device is never supervised, and the method takes over from the deprecated Company Portal–based user enrolment.

• Azure Event Hubs

  Azure service for ingesting telemetry at high volume over HTTPS or AMQP; diagnostic settings can send data to it.

• Compute log delivery

  A compute setting under Advanced > Logging that copies logs from the driver, the workers and the event stream to a chosen destination every five minutes for as long as the compute runs. A Unity Catalog volume is the preferred destination; DBFS also works.

• COPY INTO

  Loads files from a volume or cloud storage into a Delta table that already exists, skipping anything loaded before, so reruns are safe. Good for thousands of files; for millions, Auto Loader scales further.

• CSI

  Short for Container Storage Interface, the Kubernetes standard for storage drivers. Using the Azure Key Vault provider, the Secrets Store CSI Driver gives AKS pods a mounted volume containing Key Vault certificates, keys and secrets.

• Daily cap

  Limit on a Log Analytics workspace that halts data ingestion for the rest of the day once a set volume is hit.

• Init scripts

  Learn suggests steering clear of these where possible: shell scripts that execute on every classic compute node during boot, before Spark comes up. If you do need one, keep it cluster-scoped and store it in a volume; DBFS-hosted scripts are end-of-life.

• Low disk space mode

  Once free space on a cloud-tiering volume dips under the lowest of 20 GiB, 10% of capacity or the configured free space policy, Azure File Sync switches that server endpoint into this state. Tiering then happens every minute, and recalled files are not retained on disk until room becomes available again.