Azure Synapse Analytics: A Detailed Guide in 6 Points

Introduction

Imagine running a website or application where users are worldwide, and to provide the service, you need to have large data servers where you have to hire employees for constant backup and recovery. Imagine the cost your organization has to bear. So to tackle this problem, Microsoft came up with an Azure cloud computing service created by Microsoft for testing, building, deploying, managing apps and other services through 42 data centres in the world named Azure Synapse Analytics.

It provides services like infrastructure as a service (Iaas), Platform as a service (Paas), and software as a service (Saas) with tools and frameworks of your choice. It has evolved from Azure SQL DW to blend data warehousing, data integration, and big data capabilities into a single service.

In this article let us look at:

1. What is Azure Synapse Analytics?
2. Other features of Azure Synapse Analytics
3. Other enhancements included in Azure Synapse Analytics
4. The importance of Data Governance and the Introduction of Azure Purview
5. How do you create Azure Synapse workspaces?
6. Azure Synapse Purview tools to be used

1. What is Azure Synapse Analytics?

Synapse provides a single service for all tasks like processing, managing, and serving data. This is done with the integration of power BI and Azure Machine Learning. Azure can give you the freedom to manage query data on your terms. You have a choice to choose high provisioned resources or less demand when your users are online or not at the moment. Azure Synapse Analytics is a rebranding of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Azure SQL Data Warehouse was an MPP (Massively parallel processing) service that was designed to store large data with Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse.

However, Microsoft has added some special feature which put them on a competitive edge than other players in the market. Nearly 80% of the fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure as their data warehouse. Microsoft has another biggest advantage in that they are everywhere. Users are aware of their interface and their other applications, which are used on an organizational level as well, e.g. Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft PowerPoint, and MSBI (Microsoft Business Intelligence).

2. Other features of Azure Synapse Analytics

• Powerful Insights – expand insights into all your data and machine learning modules in your websites and applications.

• Instant clarity – You can instantly clear all your business-related doubts with the freshest data possible regarding Microsoft Azure Synapse Architecture.

• Unmatched security – You can secure your data on row-level security and dynamic data masking.

• Unified Experience – It reduces project development time with end-to-end solutions.

• Limitless Scale – Deliver your data to your upper management without any hassle at blazing fast speeds.

• Cost-effective – the most cost-effective and data management cloud.

3. Other enhancements included in Azure Synapse Analytics 

• Intelligent workload management, limitless concurrency, workload isolation, and workload optimization.

• Machine learning integration and business intelligence with applications including Microsoft office 365, Microsoft dynamics software, and any Saas service that support Open data Initiative

• Cloud-native HTAP Integration enables data engineers, business analysts, and data scientists to access the freshest operational data.

• Advanced security features, e.g. automated theft detection, always-on encryption, dynamic data masking, always-on encryption, and fine-grained access control at column and row level.

• Unified developing service to provide end-to-end solutions.

4. The importance of Data Governance and the Introduction of Azure Purview

Data Governance – This helps us to ensure that data is accessible, useful, and protected. Data governance leads to improved data quality, decreased data management costs, easy access to data to shareholders. This results in better decision-making and better outcomes.

Azure Purview is a data governance solution that helps you understand all the data deeply across your data warehouse and maintain control over your data usage. It’s built on the Apache Atlas framework, which is open source and easy metadata management and data warehouse governance.

5. How do you create Azure Synapse workspaces?

• Open the Azure portal in the synapse.

• Under Services, select Azure Synapse Analytics.

• Select ADD to create Workspace.

• Under the Project details, pick any Subscription.

• Use any Resource group and leave the resource group blank.

• In the Basics Tab, click Workspace details. Workspace Name > Region – pick any region where your company is located > Select Data Lake Storage Gen 2

• Click Form Subscription – select any subscription.

• My account name > Click NEW and name the storage account as your organization name.

• By File System Name > Click New this will create a primary storage account to Spark tables and application logs.

6. Azure Synapse Purview tools to be used

• Azure Synapse data Integration – You can create data pipelines and combinations for itself to access closed sources, open sources, and data warehouses.

• Synapse SQL Pools – This service allocates services for data processing and can be imported to other frameworks as well.

• Apache Spark for Azure Synapse – It provides azure to perform loading, processing, and data preparation.

Conclusion

 Azure Synapse Analytics is an evolving service and was launched in past years to enhance SQL Data Warehousing. If your business needs Azure Synapse Analytics, then you should consider getting Microsoft Azure over other services like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud as it is used by all major companies. But you need to check what suits best for your organization.  

If you are interested in making it big in the world of data and evolve as a Future Leader, you may consider our Business Analytics Certification, a 10-month online program, in collaboration with IIM Indore!

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