Book Image

Learn Azure Synapse Data Explorer

By : Pericles (Peri) Rocha
Book Image

Learn Azure Synapse Data Explorer

By: Pericles (Peri) Rocha

Overview of this book

Large volumes of data are generated daily from applications, websites, IoT devices, and other free-text, semi-structured data sources. Azure Synapse Data Explorer helps you collect, store, and analyze such data, and work with other analytical engines, such as Apache Spark, to develop advanced data science projects and maximize the value you extract from data. This book offers a comprehensive view of Azure Synapse Data Explorer, exploring not only the core scenarios of Data Explorer but also how it integrates within Azure Synapse. From data ingestion to data visualization and advanced analytics, you’ll learn to take an end-to-end approach to maximize the value of unstructured data and drive powerful insights using data science capabilities. With real-world usage scenarios, you’ll discover how to identify key projects where Azure Synapse Data Explorer can help you achieve your business goals. Throughout the chapters, you'll also find out how to manage big data as part of a software as a service (SaaS) platform, as well as tune, secure, and serve data to end users. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the big data life cycle and you'll be able to implement advanced analytical scenarios from raw telemetry and log data.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1 Introduction to Azure Synapse Data Explorer
6
Part 2 Working with Data
12
Part 3 Managing Azure Synapse Data Explorer

Exploring Data Explorer pool data with Python

In the last few years, Python has gained significant popularity in the data science community. This happened for several factors, including the simplicity of the language syntax, broad community adoption, and the availability of a vast range of mathematics and statistics libraries, among other reasons. In conjunction with the R, Scala, and SQL languages, Python has become one of the primary programming languages used in data analysis, and for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications—a space that was dominated by MATLAB, especially in academia, for decades.

Azure Synapse offers support for data exploration using Python, Scala, C#, SQL, and R. Data exploration with these languages is handled by the Apache Spark analytical engine in Azure Synapse. For this chapter, we will focus on data exploration with Python.

Support for Python in Azure Synapse is achieved through PySpark: a Python application programming...