Ryan Majidimehr lays out some updates for Azure Synapse Analytics:
Serverless SQL pools let you query files in the data lake without knowing the schema upfront. The best practice was to specify the lengths of character columns to get optimal performance. Not anymore!
Previously, you had to explicitly define the schema to get optimal query performance. In this case, the column countries_and_territories is defined as varchar(50):
There are some interesting updates in this month’s release, including the public preview of Azure Synapse Link for SQL, which connects to Azure SQL DB and SQL Server 2022.