What is Synapse Analytics?

What started out as a data warehouse in Azure, has become a central workspace for analytics in Azure. There are many other ways to perform analytics in Azure, but Synapse Analytics has become the to go area for Data Engineers and Data Scientist in the Azure portal.

The main menu in the figure above gives a great overview to the main components of Synapse Analytics.

The first area is the Home like other applications. There is where help can be found. First, we have some buttons to perform the most common tasks a new person can learn about this product.

1. Ingest - get data from a source and landing it in a Data Lake or Database are the most common ETL/ELT/ELTL options for using data.
2. Explore and analyze - once the data is landed, next is to do something with it - transform or analyze.
3. Visualize - lastly, you want a report to show analytics to users (or yourself).

There are 4 more areas in Home - Discover more, Recent resources, Feature showcase and Community. All these are guides to using Synapse Analytics.

The next menu choice is Data. This is the area for connections to data sources whether it be a database, data lake or virtual data source.

The Workspace tab contains the database(s) and the Linked tab contains connections to data lakes type resources.

Develop is where a user can write T-SQL or create notebooks to write spark or similar coding languages.

Scripts and notebooks can be Published. There is also a connection to Azure DevOps or GitHub for source control. This enables multiple developers to work together.

Integrate is Azure Data Factory embedded (to a degree) in Synapse Analytics. There are many options here to Orchestrate operations on data.

The last 2 are configuration options. They are Monitor and Manage.

Monitor is to help track what is going on and Manage it to create base objects and security.

Future articles will dive further into each of these areas. But for now, this is a good overview of the areas in a Synapse Analytics workspace.