What is Azure Synapse Analytics ? Azure Synapse Analytics Tutorial

🌐 What is Azure Synapse Analytics?

One Platform. Multiple Engines. Unified Experience.

Azure Synapse Analytics is an enterprise-grade analytics platform that combines the best of Microsoft's big data and data warehouse technologies into a single unified experience. It empowers data professionals to ingest, explore, prepare, manage, and visualize data at any scale—all in one place.

⚙️ Core Compute Engines Inside Synapse

1. Industry-Leading SQL

• Dedicated SQL Pools for high-performance, predictable workloads
• Serverless SQL Pools for on-demand querying of files in the Data Lake
• Supports T-SQL PREDICT for inline ML model scoring
• Query structured, stream, and external data with ease

2. Apache Spark for Big Data & ML

• Built-in Apache Spark 3.1 engine
• Supports Python, Scala, SparkSQL, and .NET for Spark
• Auto-scalable Spark pools with fast startup times
• Train models using SparkML and integrate with Azure ML

3. Data Explorer Runtime (Preview)

• Optimized for log and telemetry analytics
• Full-text search and semi-structured data indexing
• Great for IoT, logs, anomaly detection, and real-time insights

💾 Deep Integration with Data Lake

• Stores structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data at scale
• Supports formats like Parquet, CSV, JSON, and TSV in ADLS Gen2
• Create tables on top of raw files, accessible by Spark and SQL
• Seamless data exchange between Spark and SQL engines

🔗 Built-In Data Integration (ETL/ELT)

• Powered by the same engine as Azure Data Factory
• Code-free ETL with Mapping Data Flows
• Ingest from 90+ sources (SQL, REST APIs, SaaS, on-prem/cloud)
• Orchestrate Spark jobs, notebooks, pipelines, stored procedures

🧠 Unified Analytics Experience

• Synapse Studio: a single interface for ingestion, prep, orchestration, and visualization
• Native integration with:
  • Power BI for dashboards
  • Azure ML for predictive models
  • Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Purview, and more

✅ Final Thoughts

Azure Synapse Analytics is not just a data warehouse—it's a comprehensive, flexible analytics platform that allows you to:

• Query files and databases using SQL, Spark, and KQL
• Build a true lakehouse architecture
• Unify structured and unstructured data processing
• Create ML-powered dashboards and insights—all in one place

▶️ Watch the Tutorial Video

📺 Watch on YouTube

Published by: Aamir Shahzad | Azure Synapse Analytics Tutorial Series

Some of the contents in this website were created with assistance from ChatGPT and Gemini.