Synapse Analytics Lake database not displaying columns for Delta table

Question

When creating an external Lake database table using Delta as the source, table columns are not displayed within the Lake database viewer.

Expanding Lake database > {database} > Tables > {table} > Columns yields no results.

Is this a known limitation of using Delta as the source of an external table?

The column names are accessible using DESCRIBE.

If using a standard parquet format as the source then columns are visible.

Answer 1

Hi

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

What pool are you using? Dedicated or Serverless SQL Pool? Pls refer the below link it might give you some leads.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql/develop-tables-external-tables?tabs=hadoop

Please Upvote and Accept as answer if the reply was helpful, this will be helpful to other community members.

Answer 2

Thank you @Vinodh247-1375 ,

Hello @LyndenSchwarzer-9928 ,
It seems like this is expected behavior. I see the col (array<string>) from my end.

You can query all columns using the spark pool

%%sql  
select * from delta_employees  

Answer 3

I had the same experience when I created the database through the UI. I was able to see all of the columns once I re-created it using SQL commands:

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS yourdbname