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

Defining source and target datasets

Datasets are created in a pipeline in order to identify data stored in various data sources in different formats, such as tables, files, folders, documents, and so on. A dataset can be used by multiple activities or pipelines.

Before we start adding some transformations onto the data, we should have the required datasets in place. So, follow these instructions to create a dataset for the source:

  1. Go to the Data tab in Synapse Studio and click on + on the Data canvas, as highlighted in the following screenshot:
    Figure 4.12 – Creating a dataset in Synapse Studio

    Figure 4.12 – Creating a dataset in Synapse Studio

  2. Select Integration dataset from the dropdown, and select the required data store from the list of all available data stores appearing in the Integration dataset window. In this example, we are going to select Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 as our data store, and then click on Continue.
  3. Select the DelimitedText format for your data from the list of all available options...