Use SparkSQL without Default Lakehouse

[frithjof_v]

Make it possible to write SparkSQL without having a Default Lakehouse.

With 3- or 4- part naming, i.e.

[workspace].[lakehouse].[schema].[table] 

there should be no need to attach a Lakehouse in order to use SparkSQL.

Needing to attach a Lakehouse is annoying and adds extra complexity.

[raym85]

Oh nice! this is a good one! Agreed it can be a pain, especially when merging from feature branch to main. Seems to work well with deployment pipelines though.

[BHouston1]

Not a bad idea on the 4-part naming, but I could see an issue if a workspace is renamed and this breaks notebooks. I think that shortcuts are designed to solve for this, but then unfortunately you would need a default lakehouse before you can use them...

[smpa01]

Not exactly the way you are asking, but spark sql is capable of reading tables from unattached lakehouse by utilizing Azure Blob File System Secure path as following

%%sql
CREATE OR REPLACE TEMPORARY VIEW df
USING delta
OPTIONS (
  path 'abfss://'
);

SELECT * FROM df LIMIT 10;

[BHouston1]

@smpa01 Yes, that is available in out of the box Spark SQL, but I believe this idea is about being able to refer to tables using Fabric workspace/lakehouse conventions rather than abfss paths. Similar to Unity Catalog in Databricks. You therefore don't need a default lakehouse if you choose to always specify which lakehouse in each query.