Manage external table roles

Applies to: ✅ Azure Data Explorer

Principals are granted access to resources through a role-based access control model, where their assigned security roles determine their resource access.

On external tables, the only security role is admins. External table admins have the ability to view, modify, and remove the external table.

In this article, you'll learn how to use management commands to view existing admins as well as add and remove admins on external tables.

Permissions

You must have Database Admin permissions or be an External Table Admin on the specific external table to run these commands. For more information, see role-based access control.

Show existing admins

Before you add or remove principals, you can use the .show command to see a table with all of the principals that already have admin access on the external table.

Syntax

To show all roles:

.show external table ExternalTableName principals

To show your roles:

.show external table ExternalTableName principal roles

Learn more about syntax conventions.

Parameters

Name Type Required Description
ExternalTableName string ✔️ The name of the external table for which to list principals.

Example

The following command lists all security principals that have access to the Samples external table.

.show external table Samples principals

Example output

Role PrincipalType PrincipalDisplayName PrincipalObjectId PrincipalFQN
External Table Samples Admin Microsoft Entra user Abbi Atkins cd709aed-a26c-e3953dec735e aaduser=abbiatkins@fabrikam.com

Add and drop admins

This section provides syntax, parameters, and examples for adding and removing principals.

Syntax

Action external table ExternalTableName admins ( Principal [, Principal...] ) [skip-results] [ Description ]

Learn more about syntax conventions.

Parameters

Name Type Required Description
Action string ✔️ The command .add, .drop, or .set.
.add adds the specified principals, .drop removes the specified principals, and .set adds the specified principals and removes all previous ones.
ExternalTableName string ✔️ The name of the external table for which to add principals.
Principal string ✔️ One or more principals. For guidance how to specify these principals, see Referencing security principals.
skip-results string If provided, the command won't return the updated list of external table principals.
Description string Text to describe the change that will be displayed when using the .show command.

Note

The .set command with none instead of a list of principals will remove all principals.

Examples

In the following examples, you'll see how to add admins, remove admins, and add and remove admins in the same command.

Add admins with .add

The following example adds a principal to the admins role on the Samples external table.

.add external table Samples admins ('aaduser=imikeoein@fabrikam.com')

Remove admins with .drop

The following example removes all principals in the group from the admins role on the Samples external table.

.drop external table Samples admins ('aadGroup=SomeGroupEmail@fabrikam.com')

Add new admins and remove the old with .set

The following example removes existing admins and adds the provided principals as admins on the Samples external table.

.set external table Samples admins ('aaduser=imikeoein@fabrikam.com', 'aaduser=abbiatkins@fabrikam.com')

Remove all admins with .set

The following command removes all existing admins on the Samples external table.

.set external table Samples admins none

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