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

Implementing best practices for a Synapse Spark pool

As with Synapse SQL pools, it is also important to keep our Spark pool healthy. In this section, we are going to learn how to optimize cluster configuration for any particular workload. We will also learn how to use various techniques for enhancing Apache Spark performance.

Configuring the Auto-pause setting

There are some major advantages of using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) instead of an on-premises environment, and the Auto-pause setting is one of the best features that PaaS has to offer. If you are running a Spark cluster on your on-premises environment, you need to pay for provisioning it even though you may only need to use this cluster for a couple of hours a day. However, Synapse gives you the option to configure the Auto-pause setting to pause a cluster automatically if not in use. Upon entering a value for the Number of minutes idle field within the Auto-pause setting, the Spark pool will go to a Pause state automatically...