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

Supporting system views in a Synapse SQL pool

System views are built-in views in SQL that are used to monitor the health of a SQL pool and diagnose problems associated with the performance of a SQL pool.

Synapse SQL supports various system views, and we will be covering a few of these in this section, as follows:

  • sys.pdw_column_distribution_properties: Holds distribution information for columns.
  • sys.pdw_distributions: Holds information about the distributions on the appliance. It lists one row per appliance distribution.
  • sys.pdw_index_mappings: Maps the logical indexes to the physical name used on compute nodes, as reflected by a unique combination of the object_id of the table holding the index and the index_id of a particular index within that table.
  • sys.pdw_loader_backup_run_details: Contains information about ongoing and completed backup and restore operations in Azure Synapse Analytics (SQL Data Warehouse).
  • sys.pdw_loader_backup_runs: This is similar...