Azure Synapse Review

Last updated: October 3 2024

Azure’s data warehouse used to be called Azure SQL Data Warehouse, but Microsoft rolled that product into a larger collection of products called Azure Synapse Analytics.

Because of this, it can be a bit confusing understanding what Synapse is. The product’s landing page describes it as:

Azure Synapse Analytics is an enterprise analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems. It brings together the best of SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, Apache Spark technologies for big data, and Azure Data Explorer for log and time series analytics.

Can you just… Tell me what it is?

For the most part, Synapse is a modern, scalable data warehouse similar to Snowflake, Bigquery, and serverless Redshift. However, it also has the ability to read and write columnar data to object storage via Spark, which also makes it a data lakehouse.

I think Azure should have kept these capabilities separate, but hey, what do I know?

Pros

• It is a modern data warehouse that offers great performance on analytical queries, and separates storage from compute.
• Synapse has the most straightforward and understandable pricing out of the top data warehouse choices. Other cloud providers should take note!
  • Per-hour compute pricing.
  • Data scanned pricing.
• Compatible with SQL Server clients.
• Azure offers a decent way to do ELT from their transactional managed databases.

Cons

• Not multi cloud.
• No built in, free visualization dashboard software.
• Why did they combine the data warehouse with Spark? Just keep it separate.
  • If you want Spark on Azure, consider using Databricks.