The following table provides definitions for some of the terms that are used in this document.
Table 1. Terminology
Directory table | Directory tables store a catalog of staged files in cloud storage. |
External stage | An external (that is, S3) stage specifies where datafiles are stored so that the data in the files can be loaded into a table or queried in-place. |
External table | External tables store file-level metadata about the datafiles, such as the filename, a version identifier, and related properties. This metadata enables users to query data stored in files in an external stage as if it were inside a database. |
Materialized view | A materialized view is a precomputed dataset derived from a query specification. |
