External Catalog is old and you probably shouldn't touch it, it's mostly for wrapping the old Hive interface.
Almost all connectors now are built using the DSV2 interface either via a catalog, or directly via DataSourceRegister. I think Datasource register is mostly good for backwards compatibility (To support spark.read.format.load) and it makes more sense to build a new TableCatalog implementation (supporting spark.table and spark.sql("SELECT * from catalog.db.table"). That said you can implement both register and Catalog for a datasource if you like. On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 11:49 AM Alex Cruise <a...@cluonflux.com> wrote: > On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 11:23 AM Alex Cruise <a...@cluonflux.com> wrote: > >> I found ExternalCatalog a few days ago and have been implementing one of >> those, but it seems like DataSourceRegister / SupportsCatalogOptions is >> another popular approach. I'm not sure offhand how they overlap/intersect >> just yet. >> > > I would love it if someone could comment on when implementing > ExternalCatalog is a good idea, vs. other approaches. :) > > -0xe1a > > >>