Understanding Azure Synapse Analytics

• Azure Synapse Analytics (previously SQL Data Warehouse) is a multipurpose analytics and data warehouse service designed for organizations with SQL Server and Apache Spark skills.
• Enterprises can use the service as a hub for gaining access to relational and nonrelational data sources and applying analytics to discover insights.
• The service simplifies deployment and integration, but has limited data sources, and several features are in preview.

Azure Synapse Analytics helps customers query multiple data types and build and process analytics jobs, such as running a correlation analysis to look for trends or applying a machine learning model on real-time data to predict outages. The service automates the deployment of resources and hides the complexity of selecting, deploying, and configuring the underlying infrastructure and integrations.

Business Need

The data estate in most organizations has changed over the past 10 years to include more than traditional relational databases and data warehouses. Organizations have NoSQL document-based data, like MongoDB data stores, for Web and mobile applications, and data lakes that store unstructured data like machine logs and telemetry data. Some organizations are also adopting data lakehouses, a new architecture that uses a storage layer like the open source software Delta Lake to store structured data alongside unstructured data in the data lake, providing a single solution that hosts structured and unstructured data.