Euan Garden has some great news for us:
Starting today, the Apache Spark 3.0 runtime is now available in Azure Synapse. This version builds on top of existing open source and Microsoft specific enhancements to include additional unique improvements listed below. The combination of these enhancements results in a significantly faster processing capability than the open-source Spark 3.0.2 and 2.4.
The public preview announced today starts with the foundation based on the open-source Apache Spark 3.0 branch with subsequent updates leading up to a Generally Available version derived from the latest 3.1 branch.
It still won’t be as fast as Databricks, but it should be a good bit faster than the Spark 2 they were running.