November 4th was the 1-year anniversary of Azure Synapse Analytics (ASA). We are very excited about what this first year has brought in terms of features, functionalities, and the possibilities it offers our clients for the future. In the spirit of celebration, we wanted to go over a quick overview of that first year and highlight a few reasons you should be excited too.
ASA started out as a rebranding of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ADW). If you are not familiar, ADW was Microsoft’s cloud-based massively-parallel-processing data warehouse appliance meant to compete with on-premises solutions such as Teradata and cloud solutions like Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, and Snowflake. Over the years Microsoft has been able to position ADW in a very strong and competitive place with ADW winning the crown in terms of cost/performance.
However, a year later, ASA has gone far beyond just a rebranding. ASA is now an integrated analytics service that spans both data warehousing and big data systems – all under one umbrella. This includes runtime environments based on Apache Spark as well as the original Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Another newcomer to the runtime is a Serverless SQL environment that allows you query data stored with Azure Data Lake and other sources – this opens up options for virtual data warehouses within the Synapse Workspace.
Further, the platform offers deep integration with Power BI, Cosmos DB, and Azure ML. With Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB, specifically, you can deploy codeless real-time analytic mirrors of operational data. That is real-time data, automatically, with no code, and is optimized for an analytic workload just as a feature of the services. This and many more features open the door to solution possibilities that were difficult or even impossible for many organizations prior to the release of ASA.
If that is not enough to get you excited, here are three specific items that we think you should pay attention to:
- Accelerated time to insights – Synapse Studio’s ability to span multiple services in a single integrated development environment greatly speeds up your organization ability to deliver data insights.
- Enterprise features at any scale – ASA is capable of scaling to truly huge data solutions. However, it is often more exciting what it can do on a smaller scale. The platform facilitates even tiny organizations to take advantage of features and capabilities that were previously only available to the largest enterprises. It can quickly become a competitive differentiator.
- Modularity – the various service components of ASA are modular and can be plugged in as needed. Do not have a need for real-time streaming or machine learning today? Great, but know that the platform supports it when you are ready. This provides a solution that can grow with you and does not cause you to compromise. Additionally, it allows you to tightly manage the costs to ensure the highest level of ROI now and into the future.
Azure Synapse Analytics is evolving to be an amazing modern data warehouse platform. In the last year we are seeing a rate of adoption among our clients that is astounding. Our team is actively implementing solutions based on the platform for organizations of all types and sizes. It really has revolutionized how we are approaching modern deployments.
We are very excited about the possibilities that ASA enables and we would like to extend to you an offer for a complementary Lunch & Learn. Let one of our experts provide an overview of the platform and answer any question that you may have. Please contact Michelle Work at MWork@mailctp.com to schedule a Lunch & Learn!