Understanding Synapse SQL on-demand

SQL on-demand is a serverless distributed data processing system that enables you to analyze your big data faster. There is no need to set up infrastructure or maintain a cluster to start using SQL on-demand, so you can start querying data as soon the workspace is created.

In this section, we are going to talk about the architecture and components of Synapse SQL on-demand, the benefits of using SQL on-demand, and how you can query files in your Azure Storage accounts using SQL on-demand.

SQL on-demand architecture and components

SQL on-demand is serverless, so scaling automatically accommodates the resource requirements for any query. The SQL on-demand architecture also has a control node, a compute node, DMS, and Azure Storage, but it does not have an MPP engine; instead, it uses a Distributed Query Processing (DQP) engine.

The architecture, as illustrated in the following screenshot, explains how a control node leverages a DQP engine...