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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: Synapse notebook editor

CSA Loom synapse-notebook editor — the Synapse Studio-style Spark notebook designer: multi-language cells on a Synapse Big Data pool via Livy, authored over the Synapse dev plane. No Microsoft Fabric required.

What it is

A Synapse notebook is the Spark authoring surface in Synapse Studio — multi-language cells (PySpark, Spark Scala, Spark SQL, SparkR, .NET Spark C#) run interactively on a Synapse Big Data pool via Livy. In Loom it reads/writes the workspace notebook artifact over the Synapse dev plane and runs cells against a live Livy session through the Console managed identity.

When to use it

  • Interactive Spark data engineering / exploration against the lake with the full Synapse cell model (per-cell language, parameters cell, outline).
  • You want notebooks stored as real Synapse workspace artifacts (and backed up to ADLS), runnable later from pipelines.

Step-by-step in Loom

  1. Open the editor. Choose + New item → Notebook and pick the Synapse notebook flavor (or open an existing one). The editor opens at /items/synapse-notebook/<id>.
  2. Attach a Spark pool. Pick a Big Data pool from the attach picker; the first run cold-starts the session (about 2–3 minutes).
  3. Attach an environment (optional). Pick a Spark configuration to apply library packages and Spark session settings to the pool — surfaced from the workspace's sparkconfigurations.
  4. Author cells. Add code or markdown cells between any two cells, set the notebook default language and per-cell language, reorder, duplicate, and collapse cells in the designer.
  5. Mark a parameters cell. Designate one code cell as the parameters cell so its variables can be overridden when the notebook runs from a pipeline (papermill / ADF).
  6. Navigate with the outline. The left-panel outline tracks headings from markdown cells; click an entry to scroll to that cell.
  7. Run and inspect. Run a cell or Run all; output and error tracebacks render inline from the Livy statement result.
  8. Publish. Save publishes the notebook back to the Synapse workspace as an artifact and backs up the .ipynb to ADLS silver/loom/notebooks/.

The Azure backend it rides on

  • Artifacts: the Synapse dev plane (workspace notebook artifacts).
  • Execution: Livy sessions on a Synapse Big Data pool via the Console managed identity.
  • Backup: .ipynb copies to ADLS Gen2.

No Fabric required

Authoring and execution are Synapse + ADLS; no Fabric capacity, workspace, or OneLake is involved.

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