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

Chapter 1: Introduction to Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse Analytics, formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, is not a mere data warehouse anymore. Azure Synapse is an amalgamation of big data analytics with an enterprise data warehouse. It provides two different types of compute environments for different workloads: one is the SQL compute environment, which is called a SQL pool, and the other one is the Spark compute environment, which is called a Spark pool. Now developers can choose their compute environment as per their business needs. Azure Synapse also provides a unified portal called Synapse Studio for developers that creates a workspace for data prep, data management, data exploration, data warehousing, big data, and AI tasks.

This chapter covers an introduction to Azure Synapse and guides you on starting to use Synapse Studio. You will learn how to create an Azure Synapse workspaces and get acquainted with the components of Azure Synapse. You can start using Synapse with the sample data and queries provided in the Azure portal itself.

In this chapter, our topics will include the following:

  • Introducing the components of Azure Synapse
  • Creating a Synapse workspace
  • Understanding Azure Data Lake
  • Exploring Synapse Studio