Azure Synapse Analytics

Microsoft's new unified cloud analytics platform.

Azure's vast array of data service can be overwhelming, individually they are compelling but choosing the right services and integrating them has always been the difficult part.

Azure Synapse reduces this friction by bringing together the best of Azure's existing data services along with some powerful new features and making them play together nicely. Services that you know and love include Azure Data Factory, Mapping Data Flows, Power BI and of course SQL Pools (formally SQL Data Warehouse).

What this means is that it's now possible to explore data, run experiments, develop pipelines and operationalize solutions from a single intuitive web-based UI. While it's still early days it is starting to feel like these services were finally designed to work together and we think this will become more so as the product matures.

WE are particularly excited about the new SQL Serverless option which allows you to query data stored in your storage account or data lake without the need to spin up any clusters or compute resource. You simply point your query at your data and you are charged based on the amount of data you read. What's more, almost any existing tooling that supports SQL Server will just work.

The all new Spark environment is a breeze to setup, security and sign-on is seamless and connecting to storage accounts is very straight forward. It comes with an nteract based notebook experience for documenting your experiments which feels intuative and modern. It also comes with a .NET Kernel courtesy of the excellent .Net Interactive.

Another very interesting feature is the integration with Cosmos DB. You can now perform powerful analytical queries over your application data from Azure Synapse within minutes of it arriving in your Cosmos DB collection. Setting it up is simple and once up and running, you can run analytical queries using SQL Serverless or Spark, you can even join and combine data with other data you have in your data lake.

We also love that Power BI is part of the Synapse story, bringing all the best bits of Power BI to data engineers and professionals.

Read our blog posts about Azure Synapse Analytics

Insight Discovery (part 4) – Data projects should have a backlog

James Broome09/30/2022

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

Insight Discovery (part 3) – Defining Actionable Insights

James Broome09/23/2022

Many data projects fail to deliver the impact they should for a simple reason – they focus on the data. This series of posts explains a different way of thinking that will set up your data & analytics projects for success. Using an iterative, action-oriented, insight discovery process, it demonstrates tools and techniques that will help you to identify, define and prioritize requirements in your own projects so that they deliver maximum value. It also explores the synergy with modern cloud analytics platforms like Azure Synapse, explaining how the process and the architecture actively support each other for fast, impactful delivery.

James Broome talks about ensuring data quality at Virtual Data Platform Summit 2022

Howard van Rooijen09/20/2022

James Broome will be talking about ensuring data quality and inaccuracies in your data insights at the Virtual Data Platform Summit, which is FREE to attend.