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CSA Loom — the Microsoft Fabric experience for Azure tenants where Fabric isn't yet available: lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, semantic models, Activator rules, Data Agents, across Commercial, GCC, GCC-High, and DoD IL5

Tutorial 01 — First workspace

Comparative positioning note

This document is written from the perspective of Microsoft Azure, Cloud Scale Analytics, and CSA Loom. Any description of third-party or competing products, services, pricing, or capabilities is derived from publicly available documentation and sources believed accurate at the time of writing, and is provided for general comparison only. We do not claim expertise in, or authority over, any non-Microsoft product or service; the respective vendor's official documentation is the authoritative source for their offerings, which may change over time. Nothing here is intended to disparage any vendor — where a competing product has genuine advantages, we aim to note them honestly. Verify all third-party details against the vendor's current official documentation before making decisions.

Create your first CSA Loom workspace via the Console. 15 minutes.

Prerequisites

  • Loom deployed (see Quick Start)
  • You are a member of the Loom Admins Entra group OR have Workspace Creator role
  • Console URL open in your browser

Steps

1. Navigate to Workspaces pane

Click Workspaces in the left rail. You should see the auto-created default-workspace from initial deploy.

2. Create a new workspace

Click + New Workspace in the top-right.

Fill the form: - Name: tutorial-demo - Description: My first CSA Loom workspace - Domain: Select an existing domain or <unassigned> - Primary use case: Data Engineering (drives default settings) - Admin Entra group: pick the group whose members should admin this workspace (you can use Loom Admins for the tutorial) - Capacity allocation: Small (F2-equivalent) for the tutorial

Click Create.

3. Watch the deploy

Console shows a progress modal: - ADLS Gen2 container provisioned (~30 s) - Databricks workspace permissions assigned (~60 s) - Power BI workspace created via REST (~60 s) - ADX database added to shared cluster (~30 s) - Synapse Serverless database created (~30 s) - UC catalog (or Hive schema in Gov) created (~30 s) - Purview collection registered (~60 s)

Total: ~5 minutes.

4. Verify the workspace

Once green, click Open to navigate into the workspace home.

You should see: - 0 lakehouses, 0 warehouses, 0 notebooks, 0 semantic models, 0 KQL DBs, 0 activator rules, 0 data agents (you're about to create some) - Member list with you as Admin - Recent activity feed showing the creation event

5. Explore the panes

Click each pane in the workspace's left rail: - Lakehouse — should be empty (Files + Tables) - Warehouse — empty SQL editor; schema explorer shows the new database - Notebook — empty (no notebooks yet) - KQL — empty database in the shared ADX cluster - Catalog — shows the workspace's catalog tags

6. Cleanup (optional)

To delete the workspace: - Workspace home → Settings → Delete workspace - Type the workspace name to confirm - Console removes the RG + all child resources

What's next

Troubleshooting

If workspace creation fails: - Check Console "Monitoring → Deploy history" for the error - Most common: capacity quota exceeded — pick smaller SKU or request quota - See Deploy failure runbook