By Insight Partner Blog / 24 May 2020 / Topics: Microsoft Azure Cloud
In November, Microsoft announced Azure Synapse Analytics—a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics. Despite the massive disruptions occurring throughout industries in recent months, there continues to be a high level of excitement and enthusiasm for joining the private preview to use analytics in these times of crisis.
As announced at the Microsoft Build conference keynote on 19th May, Microsoft is excited to open the new features to every data professional with public preview availability.
Azure Synapse provides a breathtaking view of your data across data warehouses and big data analytics systems. Bringing these two worlds together into a single service is challenging as it requires unifying similar concepts that operate differently in each world such as security, privacy, and performance. With Azure Synapse, this seamless unification of data warehousing and big data not only simplifies a business’s analytics platform, but also breaks down silos that exist today because of teams, data, and skills.
Bring data teams together and enable them to seamlessly and securely collaborate, share, and analyze data. As data integration, data warehousing, and big data analytics can all be done from a single-pane-of-glass, businesses can break down organizational silos that stagnate time to insight.
Manage, secure, and analyse all types of data. A single service can query structured or semi-structured data with data warehousing resources, and also quickly execute a serverless query over unstructured data from your data lake. Enable your data professionals to build end-to-end analytics solutions without having to stitch a multitude of services together.
Take dissolving data silos to the next level with Azure Synapse Link—a cloud-native hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) implementation now available in public preview. This technology removes the barriers between Azure database services and Azure Synapse—enabling customers to get insights from their live transactional data stored in their operational databases with a single click, without managing data movement or placing a burden on their operational systems.
Bring all the existing skills across your business together to accomplish more with your data. With the deeply integrated Apache Spark and SQL engines in Azure Synapse, data professionals who prefer familiar SQL can seamlessly collaborate with those who prefer Spark—and vice versa. For instance, those familiar or who prefer SQL can query Spark tables using the T-SQL language. And data engineers or data scientists who prefer languages such as Python, Scala, SparkSQL, or C# can transform data, train models, and create proofs of concept in the same service that houses data pipelines, data lakes, and data warehouses.
Providing insights for all across your business is the key purpose of analytics. However, the cost it takes to discover and share those insights is equally important.
Early last year, Microsoft announced an independent study by GigaOm that compared Azure Synapse, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery using the highly recognized TPC-H benchmark queries. They found that Azure Synapse is up to 14x faster and costs 94 percent less than other cloud providers. A few months later, Microsoft announced a second benchmark report from GigaOm that used the TPC-DS benchmark queries that found Azure Synapse was again the industry leader in price performance. And today, Microsoft remain the undisputed leader with businesses reporting an average ROI of 271% when using Azure Synapse.
With the new public preview features, customers can continue to enjoy the industry-leading price performance for provisioned workloads, and begin leveraging the new serverless consumption model that offers pay-per-query functionality. With two ways to analyse data, customers can choose the most cost-effective option for each use case.
When it comes to data, security and privacy are paramount as the insights discovered using analytics are as precious as gold. Advanced security and privacy are built into the fabric of Azure Synapse, such as automated threat detection and always-on data encryption. And for fine-grained access control, businesses can help ensure data stays safe and private using column-level security and native row-level security, as well as dynamic data masking to automatically protect sensitive data in real-time. Most importantly, these critical features are available to all Azure Synapse customers at no additional cost.
Try the new Azure Synapse features today with an Azure free trial account.
