Azure Synapse Analytics, now in public preview, makes data insights more accessible to data professionals.

Azure Synapse is the next generation of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. And it’s more than a name change. It’s SQL Data Warehouse leveled up.

By unifying data warehousing and big data analytics systems, Microsoft is creating a game-changer that can help break down data siloes, improve collaboration, and help teams accomplish more with data.

Here’s why we’re excited for Azure Synapse:

1. Price-performance

Operating up to 14x faster and costing 94% less than the competitors, Azure Synapse Analytics offers leading price-performance.

GigaOm conducted two field tests to measure price and performance based on the industry-standard benchmarks queries. The TPC-H report found that Azure Synapse was consistently less expensive when comparing dollars per query per hour.

Meanwhile, the TPC-DS report found Azure Synapse lead the pack in performance, averaging the fastest execution time at 2,996 seconds for the entire workload of 103 field test queries.

2. Azure Synapse Link

Azure Synapse Link delivers the agility businesses need to take advantage of their operational data.

With a cloud-native architecture, Azure Synapse Link breaks down many of the barriers that businesses faced when trying to support hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP). The process used to be expensive and complex. Companies had to manage complex extract, and transform, load pipelines (ETL) to connect their analytical and operational systems, which created a delay in insights.

Azure Synapse Link bypasses that complex pipeline system and lessens the load on operational systems, which cuts down on costs and provides fresher data for faster and more accurate insights.

This will be a great tool for organizations looking to run near real-time analytics for:

• Supply chain analytics
• Supply chain forecasting and reporting
• Real-time personalization
• Predictive maintenance
• Anomaly detection
• Learn how Azure Synapse Link works below:

Azure Synapse Link is currently available in Azure Cosmos DB. Microsoft plans to release it in Azure SQL, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for MySQL, and other database services in time.

3. Enhanced Security

Azure security and privacy features are built into Azure Synapse, providing features like automated threat detection and always-on data encryption.

They go a step further with column and row-level security and dynamic masking to protect data in real-time, opening up the use cases for businesses dealing with sensitive information.

4. Integrated AI and BI

Azure Synapse uses the Common Data Model, opening up a range of Microsoft platforms to help teams create end-to-end solutions with Azure Machine Learning and the Power Platform.

Power BI is especially useful here, providing petabyte-scale interactive analytics to help your team do more with data.

Neal can now help organizations plan and budget their SQL Server migration to Azure via Microsoft’s Azure Migration Engagement (AME) program. Click here to learn more. Contact us to get started!

More on Azure Synapse Analytics: 

Azure SQL Data Warehouse for Structured Big Data

The Evolution of SQL Server from Database into an Analytics Platform 

Customer Story: Microsoft – AIRS Database Modernization