--- title: COPY TO External Data Store Statements description: This topic describes how you use COPY TO statements to structure and write the results of a query--or a copy of an entire collection--out to an external data store such as Amazon S3, GCS, and Azure Blob Storage. pubDate: 2026-08-17T09:53:44.266Z antora: editUrl: https://github.com/couchbaselabs/docs-columnar/edit/main/modules/sqlpp/pages/5_dml_copy_to_external.adoc xref: xref:analytics:sqlpp:5_dml_copy_to_external.adoc[] --- [Consult the llms.txt file for a full list of contents](/llms.txt) [View original HTML](/analytics/sqlpp/5_dml_copy_to_external.html) # COPY TO External Data Store Statements > This topic describes how you use `COPY TO` statements to structure and write the results of a query—​or a copy of an entire collection—​out to an external data store such as Amazon S3, GCS, and Azure Blob Storage. Structuring the data in the external store is useful when you plan to query it later using [dynamic prefixes](../sources/dynamic-prefixes.md) for better performance. > [!NOTE] > To be able to read or write data to or from external cloud storage, you need to configure your connection and permissions. For more information, see [AWS](../sources/required-permissions-aws.md), [GCS](../sources/required-permissions-gcs.md), and [Azure](../sources/required-permissions-azure.md). Following are the supported output formats: * [JSON](5%5Fdml%5Fcopy%5Fto%5Fjson.md) * [CSV/TSV](5%5Fdml%5Fcopy%5Fto%5Fcsv.md) * [Parquet](5%5Fdml%5Fcopy%5Fto%5Fparquet.md)