--- 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 and GCS. pubDate: 2026-08-17T09:53:44.266Z antora: editUrl: https://github.com/couchbaselabs/docs-enterprise-analytics/edit/release/2.0/modules/sqlpp/pages/5_dml_copy_to_external.adoc xref: xref:2.0@enterprise-analytics:sqlpp:5_dml_copy_to_external.adoc[] --- [Consult the llms.txt file for a full list of contents](/llms.txt) [View original HTML](/enterprise-analytics/2.0/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 and GCS. 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 exclusive permissions are required. For more information see [Cloud Read/Write Permissions](../reference/cloud%5Fread%5Fwrite%5Fpermissions.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)