Book Image

Limitless Analytics with Azure Synapse

By : Prashant Kumar Mishra
Book Image

Limitless Analytics with Azure Synapse

By: Prashant Kumar Mishra

Overview of this book

Azure Synapse Analytics, which Microsoft describes as the next evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, is a limitless analytics service that brings enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics together. With this book, you'll learn how to discover insights from your data effectively using this platform. The book starts with an overview of Azure Synapse Analytics, its architecture, and how it can be used to improve business intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Next, you'll go on to choose and set up the correct environment for your business problem. You'll also learn a variety of ways to ingest data from various sources and orchestrate the data using transformation techniques offered by Azure Synapse. Later, you'll explore how to handle both relational and non-relational data using the SQL language. As you progress, you'll perform real-time streaming and execute data analysis operations on your data using various languages, before going on to apply ML techniques to derive accurate and granular insights from data. Finally, you'll discover how to protect sensitive data in real time by using security and privacy features. By the end of this Azure book, you'll be able to build end-to-end analytics solutions while focusing on data prep, data management, data warehousing, and AI tasks.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics and Key Concepts
4
Section 2: Data Ingestion and Orchestration
8
Section 3: Azure Synapse for Data Scientists and Business Analysts
14
Section 4: Best Practices

Using sample scripts

Similar to sample data, Synapse provides a gallery of sample scripts. If you are new to Synapse Spark, this could definitely be a great place to start. We are going to pick a couple of scripts from the gallery to get ourselves acquainted with the different languages supported by Synapse.

Before we can start reading the data from Azure Data Lake Gen2, we need to get a Shared Access Signature (SAS) key for our blob storage. These keys will be used in our notebooks to access the corresponding blob storages. We can do so by performing the following steps:

  1. Go to your Azure Blob storage account on the Azure portal.
  2. Click on Shared access signature, check the Container box under Allowed resource types, and then click on Generate SAS and connection string:
Figure 7.10 – Generating an SAS for the Azure Blob storage account

Figure 7.10 – Generating an SAS for the Azure Blob storage account

In the sections that follow, we will learn about the different languages supported in a Synapse...