Azure Synapse Analytics automatically prepares and manages data for business intelligence applications. Microsoft describes it as an extension of Azure SQL Data Warehouse as it leverages analytic data from warehouse systems across organizations. Synapse Analytics comes with a dedicated workspace called Azure Synapse studio. Here customers can access tools for managing data, big data, AI tasks, and more. Microsoft points out there have been traditional barriers when customers wanted to support hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) workloads. For example, the cost of handling HTAP workloads meant most organizations would make compromises. Azure Synapse Link aims to break through those barriers: “The operational data is then automatically and continuously made available to Azure Synapse Analytics in an optimized columnar structure, similar to a covering index. No complex ETL pipelines or additional database compute resources are required and customers can run their analytics workloads on real-time data through Azure Synapse Analytics immediately and cost-effectively.”
Availability
Microsoft says the new service is currently available and can be used by Azure Cosmos DB customers. Synapse Link will arrive on other database services, including Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Database for My SQL, and Azure SQL. Today, we’re pleased to announce the preview of Azure Synapse Link, a cloud-native implementation of HTAP. You can check out more from Microsoft Build 2020 here.
