Book Image

Cloud Scale Analytics with Azure Data Services

By : Patrik Borosch
Book Image

Cloud Scale Analytics with Azure Data Services

By: Patrik Borosch

Overview of this book

Azure Data Lake, the modern data warehouse architecture, and related data services on Azure enable organizations to build their own customized analytical platform to fit any analytical requirements in terms of volume, speed, and quality. This book is your guide to learning all the features and capabilities of Azure data services for storing, processing, and analyzing data (structured, unstructured, and semi-structured) of any size. You will explore key techniques for ingesting and storing data and perform batch, streaming, and interactive analytics. The book also shows you how to overcome various challenges and complexities relating to productivity and scaling. Next, you will be able to develop and run massive data workloads to perform different actions. Using a cloud-based big data-modern data warehouse-analytics setup, you will also be able to build secure, scalable data estates for enterprises. Finally, you will not only learn how to develop a data warehouse but also understand how to create enterprise-grade security and auditing big data programs. By the end of this Azure book, you will have learned how to develop a powerful and efficient analytical platform to meet enterprise needs.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Data Warehousing and Considerations Regarding Cloud Computing
4
Section 2: The Storage Layer
7
Section 3: Cloud-Scale Data Integration and Data Transformation
14
Section 4: Data Presentation, Dashboarding, and Distribution

Using Synapse serverless SQL pools

Serverless SQL pools are an offering that was introduced with the Synapse workspace. It is a SQL engine that works in a distributed manner in the background. It can therefore offer a high fault tolerance even when you run it against bigger volumes of data in your data lake.

The serverless SQL engine comes in handy for different types of workloads:

  • Ad hoc data analysis using SQL
  • Transforming, cleansing, and preparing your data in the data lake using SQL
  • Virtual data warehousing on multiple files and folders without transporting your data any further from your data lake

As the name suggests, the serverless SQL pool does not cause upfront resource provisioning in your Synapse workspace. It is charged on a volume basis (TB queried per month) based on competitive rates (see the Further reading, Synapse pricing section). This means that you will not generate any costs when you aren't running queries on the serverless SQL pool...