Reasons why azure synapse analytics could be on your business roadmap
One of the important announcements of the recently-concluded Ignite conference by Microsoft was Azure Synapse Analytics. Built as the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, it offers limitless analytics and serverless on-demand or provisioned resources at scale to meet different business needs for ingesting, preparing, managing and serving data for business intelligence and machine learning. In short, its capabilities are far more defined than SQL Data Warehouse.
Let’s look at some of the core reasons why azure synapse analytics could be on your roadmap.
Unified data platform
Azure offers a broad range of data services; individually, they are captivating but choosing the proper services and integrating them has always been one of the difficult tasks. In such scenarios, Azure Synapse helps to reduce this friction by bringing together the existing best of Azure’s data services along with some powerful and compelling new features. Services that you know includes — Azure Data Factory, Mapping Data Flows, Power BI and of course SQL Pools (formally SQL Data Warehouse). That means it’s now possible to explore data, run experiments, develop pipelines and operationalize solutions from a single intuitive web-based UI.
SQL on your terms
In the current scenario, we’ve become familiar with services that allow organizations to use SQL to query across an array of data formats and sources. Synapse goes one step further and offers your orgnization with the option to run workloads either via a serverless compute model, on-demand, or via provisioned capacity known as SQL Pools. The new SQL Serverless option allows organizations to query data stored in the data lake or storage account without the need to spin up any clusters or compute resource. The current supported formats are Parquet, CSV, and JSON. So, if any organization is looking for an alternative to Azure Data Lake Analytics, then this is one worth looking at.
HTAP With Cosmos DB
Organizations are very much aware that Cosmos DB can now automatically write data to an optimized analytical store. It is now feasible to query this store from Spark via Synapse Link or SQL Serverless. Imagine you’ve an application database backed by Cosmos DB, and you want to access this data for analytical purposes or exploration without influencing the production system. Traditionally, organizations need to write an ETL, via the change feed possibly to replicate their data into a data lake. With Cosmos DB analytical store and Synapse Link, companies can perform robust analytical queries over the application data via Azure Synapse within minutes of it arriving in the database.
Integrated Power BI
Power BI workspaces can integrate directly with Synapse. Organizations can not only access datasets and reports within Synapse studio, but can easily curate new reports and datasets from the data you’ve created in Azure Synapse. Organizations get all the usual data connectors that are used to and since SQL Serverless looks like any regular SQL database you can rapidly run robust analytical queries during import. Previously, Power BI has put more focus on business users, but this move now puts Power BI firmly in the hands of data professionals.
Therefore, if you like to learn more about Azure Synapse analytics, then get in touch with our expert professionals at Polestar Solutions.
