Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service. It brings both enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics together.
Rohan Kumar, the Corporate VP of Azure data announced Azure Synapse as an integrated experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate machine learning and business intelligence needs.
It was launched as an extension of Azure SQL Data Warehouse and released for the first time in 2015. Generation 2 was upgraded in 2018.
Azure Synapse gives you the freedom to query data as per your terms. You can use either on-demand serverless or provisioned resources as per your business size. We can say that Azure Synapse brings both worlds together to give a seamless analytics experience.
Features of Azure Synapse Analytics
The top key features of Azure Synapse Analytics are:
- Centralized data management with integrated experience
- Workload isolation allows users to manage the execution of heterogeneous workloads.
- Ability to run queries over streaming data in the data warehousing environment.
- Get real-time data integrations with the Azure databases in your infrastructure using Synapse Link and Hybrid Transaction/Analytical Processing (HTAP) execution.
- Integration with Azure Machine Learning abilities.
- Azure Synapse Analytics integrates with other Microsoft solutions such as Azure Data Lake, Azure Active Directory, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Blob Storage, and Power BI.
- Integration with Open Data Initiative Compatible Solution.
- Ability to share data lake and data warehouse data both internally and externally with Azure Data Share Integration.
Benefits of Azure Synapse Analytics
Azure Synapse Analytics has many benefits and we are explaining the key benefits here:
Synapse Reporting
Build powerful and rich dashboards with the help of features like a centralized repository for various data sources and data lake integration of Azure Synapse. This limitless analytics service connects big data analytics, enterprise data warehousing, and data integration on a single platform. You can leverage these capabilities to build the foundation of business intelligence with AI and ML.
Azure Synapse offers you full logging capabilities for an all-size data warehouse in spite of the number of ETL changes needed. The SQL pool is the core of Azure Synapse and it hosts the whole data warehouse. You can also extend the warehouse capacity to a petabyte of data. Simply, a basic SQL server offers you so many capabilities on Azure Synapse.
End-to-end system integration capabilities
By integrating Microsoft Power BI, Synapse empowers businesses with visual representation and summaries of data directly from the warehouse. Users get the perfect workplace to manage data. You can easily link the Power BI workspace with your Synapse. Go to your Synapse Studio and click “Manage” from the left side menu. Click “Linked Services” under “External Connections”. Click “New”, select “Power BI” and insert the details for the Power BI workspace.
Image Source: Microsoft Documentation
Give a name for the linked service and select the workspace from the option list. Click ‘Create’ to build the Power BI-linked service. After linking the workspaces, browse to your Power BI dataset to create Power BI reports from Azure Synapse Studio.
Image Source: Microsoft Documentation
Your business analysts can easily create dashboards by analyzing the data. And your data engineers can manage the data pipelines in a code-free environment. In fact, the DBAs can automate the entire query optimization process. The data scientists can create data sets faster and choose the destinations for data storage.
The serverless SQL pool is the endpoint to store all the files. You can also connect your Power BI Desktop with Synapse.
After creating the credentials and database, you can build the Power BI Desktop report. Open the app and choose ‘Get data’. Select “Azure” from the left side menu on the Get Data screen and select “Azure SQL Database” from the options.
Image Source: Microsoft Documentation
After selecting the database, enter the URL and name of the database. It will display a graphical report of the data resource in the Power BI Desktop.
Integrating Azure Synapse with the Azure data factory enables users to build pipelines with Data Flows.
User Friendliness
Azure Synapse Analytics allows the DBA administrators to manage all data from a single destination. It minimizes the complexities that are involved in managing and maintaining different systems and this leads to a low total cost of ownership (TCO). You can build advanced analytical reports faster and no code is required to bring forth different services together.
Cost and Resource Savings
Creating data analytics and insights is costly. It takes huge resource utilization in any business. With increasing data volume, security and performance are also top concerns in performing analytics. Compared to other cloud service vendors, Microsoft Azure costs 94% less and is 14x faster.
Source: Microsoft Azure Blog
Synapse can process data faster and run queries in less time. And it can handle thousands of concurrent requests at the same time. In addition, the multilayered security and REST encryption make it the safest cloud service provider.
Predictive Analytics
The Machine Learning workflow of Azure Synapse helps you to create predictive analytics. It empowers the data analytics to access different available data models. And they can create their custom models too.
You can generate many predictions in just a few seconds with the help of automated Machine Learning (AutoML). You can also accelerate creating a production-ready ML model with it. The code-free ML scoring helps to generate the latest value of fresh input data relying on a specific trained ML model.
When to use Azure Synapse Analytics?
If you are scaling your business at the enterprise level, Azure Synapse is a feasible solution you should go for. By bringing both enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics together, Azure Synapse helps you to build the foundation of advanced analytics. In addition, it helps you to leverage all azure platforms and tools with easy integrations.
Katpro Technologies help you migrate to Azure Synapse with minimum downtime. Our expertise involves assessing and analyzing your data infrastructure landscape to plan a successful migration.
We use our automated tools and script development to apply the learning from the assessment to ensure that the candidate silos we take are successful.
Our team of experienced architects works with your team and identifies where we need custom wrappers to be developed to cleanse or convert the data from the source and legacy applications. We create the data pipelines using tools and frameworks as per your business needs.
The validation and sign-off practices we use are detailed. We use thorough data validation and testing strategy by leveraging automation. Our team ensures that the assessment and migration have gone through strict validation of data integrity and cleanliness.
Talk to our Azure Synapse experts for more information.
