What is Azure Synapse analytics?
Tags: azure
Published: 2023-06-29 11:56:31

Azure Synapse Analytics is a powerful cloud-based analytics service offered by Microsoft Azure. It integrates enterprise data warehousing, big data processing, and data integration into a single unified platform. It provides organizations with the ability to analyze and gain valuable insights from large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Synapse Analytics combines the capabilities of data warehousing and big data analytics, enabling users to handle diverse data workloads effectively. 

**It offers several key features and components**:

**1. Integrated Analytics:** Azure Synapse Analytics brings together various analytics capabilities, including data exploration, data preparation, data warehousing, big data processing, and machine learning, into a unified environment. This integration allows users to perform advanced analytics tasks using their preferred tools and technologies.

**2. Massively Parallel Processing (MPP):** It leverages a distributed processing architecture to deliver high-performance analytics. By parallelizing data processing across multiple nodes, it enables fast query execution and scalability for handling large datasets.

**3. Data Lake Integration:** Azure Synapse Analytics integrates with Azure Data Lake Storage, providing a unified view of structured and unstructured data. This allows users to analyze diverse data types, including files, streaming data, and relational data, using familiar SQL and programming languages.

**4. Apache Spark and PolyBase:** It includes support for Apache Spark, an open-source analytics engine, and PolyBase, a technology that enables seamless querying and integration of external data sources. This combination empowers users to perform advanced analytics and combine data from various sources for comprehensive insights.

**5. Advanced Security and Governance:** Azure Synapse Analytics offers robust security features to protect data, including data encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and auditing capabilities. It also provides governance features like data classification, data masking, and row-level security to enforce compliance and data protection policies.

**6. Collaboration and Integration:** Azure Synapse Analytics seamlessly integrates with other Azure services, such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI. This allows users to leverage the full capabilities of the Azure ecosystem for data integration, machine learning, and visualization.

Azure Synapse Analytics enables organizations to streamline their analytics workflows, leverage the power of big data, and gain valuable insights from their data assets. 

Whether it's running complex analytics queries, building data pipelines, or performing machine learning tasks, Azure Synapse Analytics provides a unified and scalable platform to drive data-driven decision-making and deliver meaningful business outcomes.  By obtaining [Azure Data Engineer Certification](https://www.edureka.co/microsoft-azure-data-engineering-certification-course), you can advance your career as an Azure Data Engineer. With this course, you can demonstrate your expertise in the basics of designing and implementing data storage, designing and developing data processing pipelines, implementing data security, data factory, many more fundamental concepts, and many more critical concepts among others.