I am trying to load the data (tabular data in tables, in a schema named 'x' from a spark pool in Azure Synapse. I can't seem to find how to do that. Until now i have only linked synapse and my pool to the ML studio. How can I do that?
The Lake Database contents are stored as Parquet files and exposed via your Serverless SQL endpoint as External Tables, so you can technically just query them via the endpoint. This is true for any tool or service that can connect to SQL, like Power BI, SSMS, Azure Machine Learning, etc.
WARNING, HERE THERE BE DRAGONS: Due to the manner in which the serverless engine allocates memory for text queries, using this approach may result in significant performance issues, up to and including service interruption. Speaking from personal experience, this approach is NOT recommended. I recommend that you limit use of the Lake Database for Spark workloads or very limited investigation in the SQL pool. Fortunately there are a couple ways to sidestep these problems.
Approach 1: Read directly from your Lake Database's storage location. This will be in your workspace's root container (declared at creation time) under the following path structure:
synapse/workspaces/{workspacename}/warehouse/{databasename}.db/{tablename}/
These are just Parquet files, so there are no special rules about accessing them directly.
Approach 2: You can also create Views over your Lake Database (External Table) in a serverless database and use the WITH clause to explicitly assign properly sized schemas. Similarly, you can ignore the External Table altogether and use OPENROWSET over the same storage mentioned above. I recommend this approach if you need to access your Lake Database via the SQL Endpoint.