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

Querying the Cosmos DB analytical store

With Azure Synapse, you get the option to choose between Spark or SQL as your compute environment. You can query a Cosmos DB analytical store using Spark and SQL Serverless, however, this feature is not available with SQL provisioned as of now.

Let's learn how to query data in the analytical store of a Cosmos DB container.

Querying with Azure Synapse Spark

Azure Synapse Spark allows you to analyze data in your Synapse Link enabled Azure Cosmos DB containers. You can query an analytical store from Spark in two possible ways:

  • Loading data to a Spark DataFrame
  • Creating a Spark table

A Spark DataFrame leverages the cached metadata through the lifetime of the Spark session, so any change in the source data will not be reflected here until you start a new Spark session. The metadata of the analytical store is reloaded on every query execution against the Spark table.

You can ingest data to the analytical store of...