The need for organisations to manage and store their data in the cloud is now a key requirement and one most are undertaking. Having a single place to store and manage all of your organisations data will allow you to transform how you use that data to drive better decision making. Key to this is a cloud data warehouse.

In this article we introduce Microsoft’s Data Warehouse product, Azure Synapse.

Data Warehouse

A Data Warehouse is a central repository of integrated data from one or more disparate sources. It is normally a relational database where you store all of your organisations structured data . This includes things like customers, stock, orders, billing and any other type of structured data. Generally you take data from the underlying systems and run it through a data factory to clean and transform that data and then store it in your data warehouse.

Your data warehouse should become the place you go looking for data to run all of your reports and analytics from.

Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse or as it was formerly called Azure SQL Data Warehouse, is the data warehouse where you will store your clean, transformed data. Azure Synapse is Microsoft’s flagship data solution, it actually takes the enterprise data warehouse and brings in a number of additional supporting services.

Azure Synapse is an integrated analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems. Azure Synapse brings together the best of SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, Spark technologies used for big data, Pipelines for data integration.

This is all accomplished with a unified experience where data prep, data management, data warehousing, big data, and AI tasks can be done in a single, unified workspace.

Additional Features of Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse goes beyond a traditional data warehouse and includes features like:

  • Deep integration with Power BI and Azure Machine learning
  • Intelligent workload management
  • Streamlined data ingestion process for petabyte scale data
  • New streaming capability allows for analytics to be ran over streaming data as it comes in.

Discover our full range of Data & Analytics services here.