Azure Synapse Analytics new features
Almost lost in all the announcements from Ignite was a bunch of amazing new features that were added to the Provisioned Resources/SQL Pool section (read SQLDW functionalities) side of Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse). Here is a quick run-down of those features:
GA features:
- Performance: Result-set caching
- Performance: Materialized Views
- Performance: Ordered clustered columnstore index
- Heterogeneous data: JSON support
- Trustworthy computation: Dynamic Data Masking
- Continuous integration & deployment: SSDT support
- Language: Read committed snapshot isolation
Public Preview features:
- Workload management: Workload Isolation
- Data ingestion: Simple ingestion with COPY
- Data Sharing: Share DW data with Azure Data Share
- Trustworthy computation: Private LINK support
Private Preview features:
- Data ingestion: Streaming ingestion & analytics in DW
- Built-in ML: Native Prediction/Scoring
- Data lake enabled: Fast query over Parquet files
- Language: Updateable distribution column
- Language: FROM clause with joins
- Language: Multi-column distribution support
- Security: Column-level Encryption
Note: private preview features require whitelisting.
More info:
Azure SQL Data Warehouse releases new capabilities for performance and security
Hi James
Thanks for a great post. It was hard to find technical details of what had changed.
A question, what is the advantage of a COPY statement over the CTAS we use now?
Thanks – Adam
Hi Adam,
The COPY statement does not use PolyBase, does not require external tables,
and will be faster than CTAS.
Thanks for the nice summary James..
Great post! With DW+BI patterns, do you think Azure analysis services (MOLAP/ROLAP) is still required given that Synapse now has multiple layers of caching built in to speed up query performance?
Hi Kumar,
I’m working on a blog to answer that exact question and I hope to post it this week 🙂