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Category: Synapse Analytics

Finding Data Factory Objects in Synapse Studio

Published 2022-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant pulls out the magnifying glass and compass:

In this post I want to cover where you can find Azure Data Factory objects in Synapse Studio. I want to do this post for a couple of reasons.

First reason is that at the start of the year I published a post on how to automate a Data Factory pipeline migration to an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace using Azure DevOps.

Even though I showed one way that you can automate the migrations of a Data Factory to a Synapse workspace I did not show where you can view them in Synapse Studio.

Second reason is because I keep telling everybody they can use the same pipelines in Azure Synapse Analytics but the objects can be found in different places.

Read on for the two places to find Data Factory objects.

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Sharing Results between Notebooks with MSSparkUtils

Published 2022-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Liliam Leme provides an answer to a common Synapse Spark pool question:

I’ve been reviewing customer questions centered around “Have I tried using MSSparkUtils to solve the problem?”

One of the questions asked was how to share results between notebooks. Every time you hit “run” in a notebook, it starts a new Spark cluster which means that each notebook would be using different sessions. Making it impossible to share results between executions of notebooks. MSSparkUtils offers a solution to handle this exact scenario. 

Read on to see what MSSparkUtils is and how it helps in this case.

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Synapse Runtime for Spark 3.3 Now in Public Preview

Published 2022-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Estera Kot has an announcement:

We are excited to announce the preview availability of Apache Spark™ 3.3 on Synapse Analytics. The essential changes include features which come from upgrading Apache Spark to version 3.3.1 and upgrading Delta Lake to version 2.1.0.

Check out the official release notes for Apache Spark 3.3.0 and Apache Spark 3.3.1 for the complete list of fixes and features. In addition, review the migration guidelines between Spark 3.2 and 3.3 to assess potential changes to your applications, jobs and notebooks.

There’s a lot in there, though I did snicker a bit at log4j 2 being more secure than log4j v1 given what we saw last year, though that gaping hole was fixed.

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A Crash Course on Synapse Studio

Published 2022-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant wants six minutes of your time:

In this post I want to do a six-minute crash course about Synapse Studio. I wanted to do this follow-up post for a couple of reasons.

First reason is because a while ago somebody who was fairly new to Azure Data Engineering Services mentioned that they thought a lot of my posts were for advanced users. So, I showed them a previous post which was a five-minute crash course about Synapse Studio.

Whilst showing them that post I realized that some of the screenshots were out of date. With this in mind I thought I would do an updated version of the crash course for Synapse Studio. Which also allows me to highlight where to find some features.

Start your timers and get reading.

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Roll Your Own Row-Level Security for the Serverless SQL Pool

Published 2022-12-08 by Kevin Feasel

Randheer Parmar wants row-level security:

Row Level Security is a very key requirement for most database or data lake applications. Most of the databases are having natively build row-level security but Synapse serverless SQL pool doesn’t support this inbuilt functionality. In this article, we will see how to implement it.

Row-level security has always seemed to me to be a great idea but not one I can implement because its performance cost is always too high.

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InvalidAbfsRestOperationException in Synapse Managed VNet

Published 2022-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kamil Nowinski goes down a rabbit hole:

This happens on the customer’s Synapse workspace where we have a public network disabled, so only private endpoint and managed VNET are available. Additionally, you probably spotted, that it took over 3 minutes to actually get this message. Hence, as a next step, in order to minimize the potential causes I simplified the query to make sure I have access to the Storage, by listing the files:

Click through for a story of pain, followed by glorious resolution.

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Data Exfiltration Protection and Synapse Pipelines

Published 2022-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Luke Moloney shuts it down:

Before we discuss how DEP applies to Synapse Pipelines, it is important to level-set on some Synapse Pipelines specific concepts – if you are familiar with Synapse Pipelines or Azure Data Factory you can skip over this section and jump to Synapse Pipeline connectivity without DEP enabled.

For a more generalized introduction to Synapse Pipelines check out this doc article.

Synapse Pipelines enables users to connect to a range of different data services, through what is called a Linked Service. 

The big trick, using self-hosted integration runtimes, is something Luke spends a fair amount of time on.

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Azure Synapse Analytics Updates for November 2022

Published 2022-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Majidimehr has a bundle of updates for us:

We are always working to improve Azure Analytics Spark performance. We are making significant changes that will increase Spark performance by up to 77%.  

Based on our testing using the 1TB TPC-H industry benchmark, you’re likely to see up to 77% increased performance. While your workload may perform differently than the TPC-H benchmark, everyone is expected to see improved performance. These Spark performance improvements come from moving to the latest Azure v5 VMs which have improved CPU performance, increased temporary SSD throughput, and lastly higher remote storage IOPS.  

Click through for a whole bunch of updates.

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Reading Serverless SQL Pool Data with Data Factory

Published 2022-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck wants to read from the serverless SQL pool in Azure Synapse Analytics:

We have some data we can query using the serverless SQL pools in Azure Synapse Analytics. For this blog post, I’m querying data that is stored in Azure Cosmos DB. Read the blog post How to Store Normalized SQL Server Data into Azure Cosmos DB to learn more about how that data got there.

Suppose I now want to read the data using Azure Data Factory. You can read data from Cosmos DB directly, but let’s pretend I want to do some transformations first using my favorite language: SQL. How can we do this?

Read on to learn how.

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