To create an external or unmanaged Delta Lake table, you need to use the EXTERNAL keyword in the CREATE TABLE statement. This indicates that the table is not managed by the catalog and the data files are not deleted when the table is dropped. You also need to provide a LOCATION clause to specify the path where the data files are stored. For example:

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE events ( date DATE, eventId STRING, eventType STRING, data STRING) USING DELTA LOCATION ‘/mnt/delta/events’;

This creates an external Delta Lake table named events that references the data files in the ‘/mnt/delta/events’ path. If you drop this table, the data files will remain intact and you can recreate the table with the same statement.

References:

https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-batch.html#create-a-table

https://docs.databricks.com/delta/delta-batch.html#drop-a-table