There was some exciting news from Microsoft today! At a digital conference, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, announced the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics and the preview of Azure Purview, Microsoft’s new unified data governance service.

Why are these announcements so important? Because to thrive, businesses need to harness the power of their data.

One of the best ways to harness the power of your data is to remove data silos. While not a new concept, achieving this has been a constant challenge in the history of data and analytics, as many ecosystems continue to be complex and heterogeneous. Organizations must break down all silos to the get the most out  of data and analytics, in a consolidated, secure, and compliant manner. Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview remove silos by creating a unified data analytics and governance service.

Now that we’ve given you an overview of the announcements, let’s break down the details of each Azure service.

What is Azure Synapse Analytics? Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together traditional data warehousing and big data analytics – into one offering! Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a centralized experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning applications.

Azure Synapse Analytics Highlights

  • New cloud native distributed SQL engine
  • Deep integration with Spark
  • Flexible service query options – Serverless + Dedicated
  • Power BI + ML integration
  • Azure Synapse Link – Enables real-time data analytics with link to your operational database
  • TPC-H benchmark at PB scale
  • Native Row Level Security – This is not possible with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery
  • Citizen Data Scientist capabilities with direct ML integration
  • Code Management – Automation, code sync to dev/master branch, and end to end deployment lifecycle
  • Power BI integration from inside the Synapse service
  • Ability to add Power BI reports into Teams for end users

What is Azure Purview? It is critical to enable these capabilities through a comprehensive data governance solution. An organization that does not know where its data is, does not know what its future will be.  Azure Purview is a unified data governance service that helps organizations achieve a complete understanding of their data. Azure Purview empowers users to discover all data across the business, track lineage of data and create a business glossary wherever it is stored: on-premise, across clouds, in SaaS applications, or in Power BI.

Azure Purview Highlights

  • Key important and rich features: Compliance, Catalog and Data Map
  • Sourcing from on-prem, SaaS, and multi-cloud services
  • Data Map: search/browse data by tech/non-tech domain
  • Business glossary
  • No manual building of data dictionary
  • Data scanning by clicking on a button
  • Automated data classification with custom options
  • Schedule for future scanning and classification
  • Easy cloud based data search
  • Data lineage and reporting
  • Free scanning: On-premise SQL Servers, Power BI Service, data sensitivity labeling for O365 E5 customers

The combination of Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview enables organizations to develop the capabilities needed to empower their teams to leverage all data for analytics and data governance, silo-free.