Cost Management for Serverless SQL Pool in Azure Synapse Analytics

💰 Cost Management for Serverless SQL Pool in Azure Synapse Analytics | Optimize Your Budget

Serverless SQL Pool in Azure Synapse Analytics offers flexibility and ease for querying big data directly from Azure Data Lake. But to make the most of its pay-per-query model, it's crucial to understand how costs accumulate and how to manage them effectively.

📊 How Serverless SQL Pool Pricing Works

💵 Billed at $5 per TB of data processed (as of writing — subject to change)
✅ No cost for metadata-only queries, failed queries, or cached query replays
🧠 You only pay for the amount of data scanned — not storage or compute provisioning

🛠️ Track Usage with DMV

Use the built-in dynamic management view sys.dm_external_data_processed to monitor processed data per session or query.

SELECT
    session_id,
    user_name,
    start_time,
    end_time,
    external_data_source_name,
    total_bytes_processed / 1024.0 / 1024.0 AS MB_Processed,
    total_bytes_processed / 1024.0 / 1024.0 / 1024.0 AS GB_Processed
FROM sys.dm_external_data_processed
ORDER BY start_time DESC;

💡 Tip: Monitor usage trends over time and identify high-cost queries for tuning.

🧠 Best Practices to Optimize Serverless SQL Costs

🎯 Use SELECT with specific columns instead of *
🔍 Apply WHERE filters early to minimize scanned rows
📁 Partition files in folders for more efficient scanning
📝 Cache results in Power BI or downstream tools instead of rerunning queries
📂 Prefer Parquet format over CSV — it’s columnar and compresses well
🔄 Reuse successful query results to avoid reprocessing

📉 Monitor Query Patterns

Use Synapse Studio’s built-in Monitor Hub to track executions and durations. You can also connect Synapse logs to Azure Monitor or Log Analytics for more detailed analysis.

📌 Quick Formula

Cost = (Bytes Processed ÷ 1 TB) × $5

For example, processing 200 GB:

200 ÷ 1024 = 0.195 TB
0.195 × $5 = $0.98

📺 Watch the Full Tutorial

Learn how to control costs in Serverless SQL Pool step-by-step:

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