Steve Hughes walks us through three Elastic concepts in Azure:
Elastic queries allow developers to interact with data from multiple databases supported on the Azure SQL database platform including Synapse. Elastic queries are often referred to as Polybase which is currently implemented in SQL Server 2019 and Azure Synapse. The key difference is that elastic queries only allow you to interact with other Azure SQL Databases but not Hadoop or other database implementations (e.g. Teradata or Oracle). Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the implementation looks very similar. Both toolsets use external tables in SQL Server to interact with the connected data sources. However, Polybase requires additional components to run whereas elastic queries are ready to go without additional setup.
Read on for more information, including demos.