Teo Lachev lays out a review of serverless SQL pools in Azure Synapse Analytics:
Being able to query files using SQL is great. Some of you might remember the U-SQL language that was introduced a few years ago alongside Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 1 which is now deprecated. It never caught up because it looked like SQL but it wasn’t (it was actually closer to C#). Now we’re talking about real SQL. To query files! This opens the possibility to implement a logical warehouse (the emphasis is on logical as everyone to my knowledge who tried to replace a data warehouse with a data lake has failed). Or, you can connect Power BI to the serverless endpoint and start querying all these files in DirectQuery mode. So, this enables real-time BI on top of file extracts.
Click through for the pros and cons of using serverless SQL pools today.