I have an azure synapse workspace that contains a number of pipelines & external tables in the serverless sql pool. all associated with one particular project.
There are another 2-3 completely separate projects on the way that will require a synapse toolset.
Should i create a new workspace, or allow them all to share this one? What is the best criteria to use to decide?
This is probably a bit of an opinion question which don't tend to do that well on StackOverflow, but that said, I tend to think of Synapse Workspaces as similar to an instance of SQL Server, so historically, why would you have used the same SQL instance?
Generally this was where projects have things have in common, eg same data, similar permissions (AAD) groups, similar HADR requirements etc, so ask yourself those questions.
Bear in mind you can have multiple databases (dedicated and serverless) within a workspace but cross database queries for tables in a dedicated sql pool are only possible via Spark Pools1. This could work in your favour if you require separation. Also bear in mind you can connect multiple storage accounts to the workspace. There is no cost overhead to having multiple workspaces, but there is an admin overhead and there would be a cost implication to duplicating any of your data across multiple lakes, storage accounts and databases.
One example - we're using workspaces for environments for example where there aren't separate dev, test, uat Azure subscriptions.
So a few things to consider.
1 import the two tables as dataframes then join them in a Synapse notebook as per this example
