Hopefully, you’ve already heard about Azure Synapse. One of the newest Azure offerings, Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together, data warehousing, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. I’d like to tell you about the “launchpad” for all things Synapse – Synapse workspaces.

With Synapse workspaces you can do many things including development, ETL, ELT, DevOps, Azure ML, and Power BI. When you create a new workspace, you automatically get a serverless pool.

  • When you go into your workspace, you’ll see Activity Hubs in Synapse Studio. These hubs organize the tasks needed for building analytics solutions.
  • Synapse Studio is divided into Activity hubs; there are currently 6 hubs:
    • Overview and data – where we can explore all our structured/unstructured data
    • Develop – the development hub where you can use workbooks, SQL, etc.
    • Orchestrate, monitor, and manage – these look like Azure Data Factory, they have the same look & feel and do the same jobs.
  • Pools are comparable to databases in Synapse Analytics. There are 3 kinds of pools; serverless, dedicated, and Spark.
  • Each workspace has a serverless pool by default.
    • In my serverless pool cheat sheet (To see this, please watch my video included), you’ll see we have Spark, Cosmos DB, and Azure Data Lake Store as the 3 data sources you can use.
    • The input types are Parquet, CSV, and JSON. Parquet is the better way to do things as it’s compressed, so it only has to read a large piece of the data in a compressed format into memory. In other words, it doesn’t have to go back to the well as often.
    • Also, think about portioning your data in some logical way when you begin working with this. This way, if your data doesn’t belong to a certain partition, it won’t go looking for it somewhere it’s not.
    • Also, think about different landing zones for different data (refer to the flow chart on my cheat sheet).

In my video, I demo how to use a Synapse Analytics workspace so be sure to check that out. I’ll walk you through how a workspace, as well as how serverless, works.

My advice is to go in the Azure portal and give Azure Synapse Analytics workspace a try. Play around with it and see what you can do.

Quickstart in Microsoft docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/quickstart-create-workspace

 


If you have questions about Azure Synapse Analytics, either how to use it or how to implement it in your organization, reach out to us. Our expert team and solution offerings can help your business with any Azure product or service, including Managed Services offerings. Contact us at 888-8AZURE or  [email protected].