Microsoft announces Azure Synapse Analytics

Microsoft has announced Azure Synapse Analytics, a major new Azure service that the company described as the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

Like SQL Data Warehouse, the cloud-based service aims to bridge the gap between data warehouses and data lakes.

Azure Synapse

A cloud-native, distributed SQL processing engine sits at the foundation of Azure Synapse, which Microsoft says is designed to support the most demanding enterprise data warehousing workloads.

Azure Synapse taps into a range of other Microsoft services such as Power BI and Azure Machine Learning. It is also integrated with a robust partner ecosystem that includes Databricks, Informatica and Talend, as well as Apache Spark.

This means that someone working on Azure Synapse will be able to manage and analyze data from disparate sources from a single service. Relational and unstructured data can be analyzed using standard SQL.

A new feature, Azure Synapse Studio also provides data scientists with a single workspace to prepare and manage their data, offering a code-free environment to manage data pipelines.

As reported, Microsoft’s Rohan Kumar, a corporate VP of Azure Data, at Microsoft Ignite demonstrated how Azure Synapse successfully ran a query over a petabyte of data faster than competitors such as AWS Redshift and GCP BigQuery, handling thousands of concurrent users.

In a blog entry, John Macintyre, a director of product at Azure Data billed Azure Synapse as the “first and only analytics system to have run all the TPC-H queries at petabyte-scale”.

“Azure Synapse deeply integrates with Power BI and Azure Machine Learning to drive insights for all users, from data scientists coding with statistics to the business user with Power BI,” wrote Macintyre, noting that the various new features will make all types of analytics possible.