How to set default Lakehouse in the notebook programmatically?

[keataunooi]

Hi All,

Here are my workspace setup:

Workspace	Fabric's Artifacts	Git branch folder
Fabric-Sandbox	notebook: landingtoBronze lakehouse: Bronze	feature/bronze123
Fabric-Dev	notebook: landingtoBronze lakehouse: Bronze	Dev

Problem:

Each time i updated the notebooks code to the Fabric-Dev workspace , i need to attach bronze lakehouse to "landingtoBronze" notebooks manually in the workspace so that it point to the right bronze lakehouse.  

Please note that each workspace has it own Bronze Lakehouse.

For example, I was working in the "landingtoBronze" notebook in my feature branch in the Fabric-sandbox workspace. during the notebook development, I attached the bronze lakehouse of the workspace as default lakehouse to the notebook.

once i had finished my notebook development, i created the pull request and merge the code from feature branch into dev branch.

while getting the code updated in the Fabric-Dev workspace, I can see the default bronze database is actually referring to the Fabric Sandbox workspace. 

Is it possible to attach a default lakehouse in the notebook programmactically?

Looking forward to hearing for any suggestion. it could be something that i am doing wrongly.

 Thanks.

[gori137]

Thanks for an excelent question. I can't use the %%configure command.
The error message is :
UsageError: Line magic function '%%configure' not found.

[PunChili]

Same for me. Is there missing a library? Isn't this magic part of sparkmagic? When use %pip install to install sparkmagic, an error is occurring "ERROR: Could not build wheels for gssapi, krb5, which is required to install pyproject.toml-based projects"...

[felipe_regis]

For some people it worked but It didn't work for me. I got "UsageError: Line magic function `%%configure` not found."

Why?

Thanks

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @keataunooi 
Thanks for using Fabric Community.
To programmatically attach a lakehouse for a session level, you can use this below code in your notebook:

# Welcome to your new notebook
# Type here in the cell editor to add code!
%%configure
{
    "defaultLakehouse": {  # This overwrites the default lakehouse for current session
        "name": "your-lakehouse-name",
        #"id": "<(optional) lakehouse-id>",
        #"workspaceId": "<(optional) workspace-id-that-contains-the-lakehouse>" # Add workspace ID if it's from another workspace
    }
}

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

[raviraoin]

Thanks for sharing!

The approach works when you need to attach a single lakehouse—whether from the same workspace or an external one. However, we have a scenario that requires multiple lakehouses in one notebook:

• Platform workspace holds our base shortcut tables.

• Reporting workspace hosts notebooks that consume those shortcuts and persist transformed output.

• In each notebook, we must attach:

  1. The Reporting workspace lakehouse (for writing results)

  2. One or more Platform workspace lakehouses (as input sources)

Because Fabric notebooks only support a single configuration cell, we currently rely on a post-deployment automation script to rebind the additional lakehouses for UAT/Prod. This extra step is manual and adds complexity.

Question: Is there a recommended workaround or best practice for attaching multiple lakehouses—across the same or different workspaces—directly within a Fabric notebook, without triggering a Spark session restart?

Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[lyjavier]

But is that I have to have this cell at first in the notebook?

[v-ranjands]

Hi @Anonymous 

If I have a Lakehouse with the same name both in Dev and in Prod workspaces, this code will attach the corresponding Lakehouse , if I do not specify Workspace ID ?

[srinivas1125]

Even I have the same question. Does it attach lakehouse from the current workspace in case workspaceid is not mentioned?

And also does the notebook use other lakehouses of current workspace in SparkSQL ?

[keataunooi]

Thanks. just tested the code you provided. it works. 

I also figure out the default lakehouse of the notebook can be overriden by the pipeline deployment rules 

Create deployment rules for Fabric's Application lifecycle management (ALM) - Microsoft Fabric | Mic...

Thanks again!

[Anonymous]

Hi @keataunooi 
Glad that your query got resolved. Please continue using Fabric Community for any help regarding your queries.