Chapter 1: Introduction to Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse Analytics, formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, is not a mere data warehouse anymore. Azure Synapse is an amalgamation of big data analytics with an enterprise data warehouse. It provides two different types of compute environments for different workloads: one is the SQL compute environment, which is called a SQL pool, and the other one is the Spark compute environment, which is called a Spark pool. Now developers can choose their compute environment as per their business needs. Azure Synapse also provides a unified portal called Synapse Studio for developers that creates a workspace for data prep, data management, data exploration, data warehousing, big data, and AI tasks.
This chapter covers an introduction to Azure Synapse and guides you on starting to use Synapse Studio. You will learn how to create an Azure Synapse workspaces and get acquainted with the components of Azure Synapse. You can start using Synapse with the sample data and queries provided in the Azure portal itself.
In this chapter, our topics will include the following:
- Introducing the components of Azure Synapse
- Creating a Synapse workspace
- Understanding Azure Data Lake
- Exploring Synapse Studio
