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Whitefox logical organization

Concepts:

Towards recipients, the logical organization of tables is the following:

external_logical_org

  • Share: A share is a logical grouping to share with recipients. A share can be shared with one or multiple recipients. A recipient can access all resources in a share. A share may contain multiple schemas.
  • Schema: A schema is a logical grouping of tables. A schema may contain multiple tables.
  • Table: A table is a Delta Lake table or a view on top of a Delta Lake table.
  • Recipient: A principal that has a bearer token to access shared tables.
  • Sharing Server: A server that implements this protocol.

Internally organization is a bit more complex:

internal logical org

  • Provider: a composed entity that allows to access a table existing in an external system. A provider is composed by a storage system and optionally a metastore (or catalog?)
  • Storage: an object storage that contains the table data
  • Metastore: a system that provides metadata about tables, it is mandatory for Iceberg tables and can be useful for discovery in general