Azure Synapse Analytics: Introduction to the Unified Platform

Azure Synapse Analytics (announced at Ignite 2019) is the evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. It’s now a unified analytics platform combining Big Data and Data Warehousing.

What’s New

• On-demand queries: Query data lake files without loading
• Unified workspace: Data prep, SQL, Spark, and pipelines
• Synapse Studio: Web-based unified experience
• Power BI integration: Direct connectivity

Two Execution Modes

• Dedicated SQL pools: Provisioned DWUs for predictable workloads (formerly SQL DW)
• Serverless SQL: On-demand queries, pay per query

Query Data Lake

-- Query Parquet files in data lake directly
SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET(
    BULK 'https://datalake.blob.core.windows.net/data/*.parquet',
    FORMAT='PARQUET'
) AS [result]

Who Should Care

If you’re doing analytics on Azure – data warehousing, data science, or BI – Synapse is the future. Start exploring now.