What is Azure Synapse Analytics?

Microsoft’s Azure Synapse Analytics is a one-stop shop for your data management and analytics needs. We’ll dive into a few key features it has to offer, and how it can make handling data a little easier.

This post originally published on 3/17/2022

As Microsoft describes, Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless, analytics service that brings together data integration, data warehousing, and big data analytics in a single, consolidated view. Azure Synapse enables data professionals to deliver a diverse set of use cases for analytic needs, enclosing previously isolated service requirements for data integration and processing.

Let’s dive into an overview of the integrated Synapse Studio, and the functionality it provides.

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With Azure Synapse, data engineers, analysts, and data scientists can seamlessly collaborate on the same objects within the workspace. This helps data users to eliminate data silos and data management bottlenecks.

Here are a few features and benefits of Azure Synapse:

Ease of configuration and provision of the workspace
Complete data security with ACL and data encryption at rest and transit
Primary Azure Data Lake Storage to store catalog data and metadata
Repository for all data types in a single scalable workspace
Synapse Link, a new feature that enables real-time operational analytics to accelerate decision making
Support for T-SQL, Scala, Python, R, and Spark SQL
Built-in visualizations for query result explorations
Integrated access control to Synapse Workspace resources

Flexible Consumption Models for Various Analytics Needs

Serverless

Every workspace comes with a serverless SQL pool (built-in pool) by default
A pay-per-query model and optimized for ad-hoc explorations on a data lake without data movement
Automatic generation of T-SQL using OPENROWSET functionality or quick creation of a Power BI visual directly on data lake files

Dedicated

MPP architecture optimized for critical data warehouse needs
Cost is determined by dedicated data warehouse units and charged by hour the pool is active
Suited for descriptive analytic needs

Apache Spark Pools

Serverless Apache Spark to boost big-data analytic application
All code, multi-language support
Suited for predictive modeling of data and machine learning use cases using Synapse Notebooks

Hybrid Data Integration

Built-in Synapse Pipelines and code free transformational data flows for data integration
Cloud native ETL/ELT
Operationalize into pipelines and triggers for scheduling

Bringing Together BI and Data Science Insights – Power BI and Machine Learning

Azure Synapse integrates with other Microsoft services such as Power BI and Azure Machine Learning which strengthens and broadens the capabilities of this unified platform.

Perform diagnostic and descriptive analysis with Power BI integration
Direct report development and secure publishing in Synapse Studio
Deliver actionable insights on enterprise-grade semantic models

Leverage machine learning models in an ML workspace to train, analyze, and enrich data
Low/no-code supports classification, regression, and time-series forecasting models
Deploy and launch predictions with the SQL scoring wizard

The different dimensions of data, technologies, and skills can lead to a paradox of analytics. This is why Azure Synapse Analytics is the perfect solution as it offers a single service platform for building end-to-end analytics at a cloud-scale.

In our upcoming blog posts, we will cover more in-depth concepts and how Synapse Analytics works in action.

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Keep Reading: Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs Snowflake Cloud Data Warehouse

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