Using T-SQL queries on semi-structured and unstructured data
Azure Synapse SQL on-demand allows you to query data in your data lake. The OPENROWSET
function is used in SQL on-demand to query an external data source. We will learn how to use this function for reading different types of files.
Reading Parquet files
Parquet is an open source file format that is designed for efficient, as well as performant, flat columnar storage of data. Synapse provides a feature to read Parquet files directly, using the OPENROWSET
function.
The easiest way to read a Parquet file's content is to provide the file Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to the OPENROWSET
function and specify the Parquet
format, as illustrated in the following code snippet:
select top 10 * from openrowset(     bulk 'https://pandemicdatalake.blob.core.windows.net/public/curated/covid-19/ecdc_cases/latest/ecdc_cases.parquet',     format ...