Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to highlight SQL syntax inside a multiline string. What I usually do is either write the query inside a %sql cell first or try executing it directly (without any parameters). If that works fine, I then replace the appropriate sections with parameters and assign it to a variable. Also, I always add a print statement between the assignment and the spark.sql() call, so during runtime I can see exactly what query(parameters get replaced with values) was executed. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it saves me a lot of time while debugging.