Ginger Grant gives us the nickel tour of why Azure Synapse Analytics is interesting:
In the past few months, I have been examining Azure Synapse and what it can do. When it was first released in November of 2019, the first functionality that was rolled out was an update of Azure SQL DW. For this reason, many people think that Synapse is just an improved version of a cloud data warehouse. Microsoft did improve SQL DW when it moved it to Synapse. The biggest architectural design change is the separation of the code from the compute, a theme with many web projects, which allows the compute power to be increased when need dictates and scaled down when computing needs change. Within Synapse, resources are allocated as Pools and you can define a sql pools to run data warehouse and later change the compute to a different resource. You will still need to partition your DW as large datasets require partitioning to perform well. Subsequently Microsoft Released the Azure Synapse Studio to be a container for a larger environment of tools and notebooks to interact with them.
But it’s more than that. Read on to see what else is available.