Analytics with Limitless Scale on Microsoft Azure - Part 1

This is the first in a series on the topic of Azure Synapse Analytics, a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics.

Azure Synapse Analytics

The Myriad of Pipeline Tool Choices

As any data engineer who works on building and maintaining data pipelines knows, choosing or finding the perfect service match is a daunting and meticulous task. We've seen that services are evolving to make it easier to ingest, process and maintain pipelines, but even with all these new technologies available on the market, making all these pieces work together is one of the hardest parts of a data engineer job.

Big data is complex, not only because of the nature of the 3Vs (volume, variety, and velocity) but implementing solutions within the company to empower users requires getting rid of some obstacles such as:

• Choosing a Cloud Service Provider
• Adopt Big Data Services
• Enable Service Integration
• Sizing of Services
• Administration of Solution
• Monitoring and Security

Data is everywhere. Building a platform to deal with this humongous volume and variety requires time and planning. This exercise also requires a new mindset where your team needs to have a data-centric vision because we can't solve today's problems with outdated solutions.

The data must be ready for consumption rapidly. This urge is a differential if you want to take your business to another level. Velocity is what determines the success of your solution - everyone wants data, we're data eaters. Having the right data at the right time turns your solution to scale globally faster than you think and in order to achieve this, you must glue together all the choices wisely. Why not have an architecture that enables you to do that?

Modern Data Warehouse Architecture

The ideal of a modern data warehouse solution promises to solve, or at least tackle, the data integration problem by bringing together data of any size or format to a single location. And from that single location, you can get insights through analytical dashboards, operational reports or advanced analytics for all users. This is what we call data democratization.

The data lake helps companies unlock the true potential of their data by unifying data from across the organization. And this means no more silos. The democratization of data in this way enables companies to bring unprecedented insights because with all data sitting in one place it makes easier than ever to solve all problems. Right? Well, not exactly!

There are so many pieces that need to be plugged in to get the real benefit of the modern data warehouse approach. But addressing the data raw centralization is a good beginning for this journey.

To embrace this new architecture, you must bring big data to your company. By saying this, you should know that this will add more products and services than you can possibly count or think of. Below are some big data products from Microsoft Azure that you should include in your data pipeline solution in order to thrive in this new endeavor.

This new way of dealing with problems makes it easier for data professionals. Now you can tap into a single place and get insights quickly, but a data pipeline solution is made not only by a data lake. Technologies need to talk between each other, data processing needs to be achieved fast if you want to benefit from this platform, and orchestration needs to engage with all the parts of a big data puzzle. Welcome to the untold story of a data engineer. This is where the Azure Synapse Analytics comes to play!

Turning the Hype into Results with Synapse Analytics

Azure Synapse Analytics is a new Azure offering that provides limitless analytics service by bringing the data lake and data warehouse together.

Synapse Analytics is a breakthrough on the market because it features Synapse Studio, which uses linked services to plug various services together in a unified place for a unique experience. It enables you to link all the products in one studio that will empower you to make the end-to-end big data analytics pipeline using the best-of-breed technologies available on Azure.

This brand new service provides you with the following powers:

• Hybrid Data Ingestion
• Perform Analytics with Limitless Scale
• AI & Big Data Deeply Integration
• Query Compute On-Demand
• Monitoring and Managing Security

Now you can centralize your entire modern data warehouse solution in one place. This is the first time ever that a service can provide such power and integration in an easy-to-access and consumable way.

Azure Synapse Analytics is the evolution of the Azure SQL DW product. This is the next generation that gives data professionals the opportunity to query both relational and non-relational data using the powerful and most-used language for data analysis, SQL. But not only that, now you can use either the serverless on-demand queries to perform data exploration and ad-hoc analysis or provisioned resources for the most demanding data warehouse queries - which means a PaaS and SaaS offering in one single product. What a leap, Microsoft!

There is no better option to bring your data engineers, data scientists and data analysts to a single place where they can torture your data until it confesses the truth.

This is a series of posts, so I strongly recommend you to subscribe to not miss the other posts that are coming up soon.

Check out for more info about Azure Synapse Analytics here - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/synapse-analytics/