
Azure DW is a powerful tool for businesses looking to gain valuable insights from their data. It allows for scalable and secure data warehousing, enabling organizations to make informed decisions.
With Azure DW, you can easily integrate data from various sources, including relational databases, NoSQL databases, and cloud-based services. This integration enables a unified view of your data, providing a more comprehensive understanding of your business.
By leveraging Azure DW's advanced analytics capabilities, businesses can uncover hidden trends and patterns in their data, leading to improved decision-making and increased revenue. For example, a retail company using Azure DW can analyze customer purchasing habits and optimize their marketing strategies accordingly.
Azure DW also provides real-time analytics, enabling businesses to respond quickly to changing market conditions. This is particularly useful for companies operating in fast-paced industries, such as finance or e-commerce.
What Is Azure DW?
Azure DW is a cloud-based data warehousing solution from Microsoft. It's the next iteration of the Azure SQL data warehouse. Azure DW provides a unified environment by combining the data warehouse of SQL and big data analytics capabilities of Spark. This makes it easy to move data between both and from external data sources.
Azure DW allows us to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs easily.
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Features
Azure DW is a powerful tool for managing large volumes of data. It uses massively parallel processing technology to efficiently process and analyze data.
One of the key features of Azure DW is its ability to handle both structured and unstructured data. This is made possible by its support for a wide range of scripting languages, including Scala, Python, .Net, Java, R, SQL, T-SQL, and Spark SQL.
Azure DW also offers scalability and flexibility, allowing it to handle workload variations without downtime. This is achieved through instant scalability and flexibility, which reduces manual efforts for collecting, collating, and building reports.
Here are some of the key features of Azure DW:
- Cloud data warehousing, dashboarding, and machine learning analytics in a single workspace
- Ingests all types of data, including relational and non-relational data, and allows exploration with SQL
- Uses massively parallel processing database technology for efficient data processing and analysis
Azure DW also integrates seamlessly with various Azure services, such as Azure Data Lake, Azure Blob Storage, and more. This makes it easy to integrate with other tools and services, and to build end-to-end analytics systems.
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In addition, Azure DW offers advanced security and governance features, including real-time data masking, dynamic data masking, always-on encryption, and Azure Active Directory authentication. This ensures that your data is secure and protected, even in large-scale data stores.
Azure DW also offers elasticity, which allows users to scale computing independently and only pay for what they need. This makes it a cost-effective solution for managing large volumes of data.
Overall, Azure DW is a powerful tool for managing large volumes of data, and its features make it an ideal solution for a wide range of use cases.
Setup and Configuration
To set up a connection, you'll need to follow these steps. On the Add a Data Source screen of the wizard, specify the necessary details.
First, click Save and Continue. This will open the next wizard screen - Set Up a Service Account.
Note that you should not select the Kerberos Use Kerberos checkbox.
Security and Compliance
Azure DW offers robust security features, including encryption of data both at rest and in transit. This ensures that your data is protected from unauthorized access.
Always-on data encryption is a key feature, encrypting data in transit and at rest. This provides an additional layer of security to safeguard your sensitive information.
Data encryption helps prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data, but Azure DW also offers dynamic data masking. This limits access to sensitive data, preventing it from being exposed to unauthorized users.
Granular access controls are also available, including column-level security and native row-level security. This allows you to control access to specific data points, ensuring that only authorized users can view sensitive information.
Meeting national, regional, and industry-specific compliance requirements is also a priority for Azure DW. It meets requirements such as HIPAA, ISO 27001/27002, PCI DSS, SOC 1 Type II, SOC II, SOC III, CJIS, HITRUST, ISMS, Germany C5, and more.
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Performance
Azure DW's performance capabilities are truly impressive. Near-infinite scaling of storage and compute resources allows for massive growth without sacrificing speed.
With massively parallel processing, Azure DW can handle complex queries with ease, leveraging coordinated query processing by multiple computer processors.
Reserving resources for specific workloads by creating workload groups ensures that each task gets the resources it needs, minimizing conflicts and delays.
Result-set caching speeds up queries by delivering precomputed/cached results, saving time and improving overall efficiency.
Clustered columnstore indexes increase query performance and improve data compression by up to 10 times, making it easier to work with large datasets.
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Data Management
Azure DW's data management capabilities are top-notch. It allows for flexible scaling of data processing resources based on demand, enabling efficient handling of substantial data volumes.
Azure Synapse Analytics harnesses the power of Apache Spark, a potent open-source big data processing engine. This means you can handle large-scale data processing with ease.
To manage large datasets, Azure DW offers a scalable and secure data repository. This is achieved through its ability to handle computation and storage resources independently, allowing for scalability and only paying for what you need.
Azure Synapse Analytics has four main components: Synapse SQL, Spark, Synapse Pipelines, and Studio. Synapse SQL is a T-SQL-based analytics service that offers two consumption models: dedicated and serverless.
Here are the key features of Synapse SQL:
- Dedicated SQL pools are used for dedicated models and a workspace can have any number of these pools.
- Serverless SQL pools are used for serverless models and every workspace has one of these pools.
Azure Synapse Analytics also offers Synapse Pipelines, which has the following features:
- Data Integration
- Data Flow
- Pipeline
- Activity
- Trigger
- Integration dataset
In terms of data ingestion, Azure DW can handle data from disparate sources, including financial, marketing, and sales data. This is achieved through its scalable and secure data repository.
Azure SQL Data Warehouse has several key features, including:
- Elasticity: separate computational and storage components allow for scalability
- Security-oriented: features like row-level security, data masking, encryption, and auditing
- High scalability: Azure has exceptional scalability, allowing for quick scaling up and down
Overall, Azure DW offers a robust data management solution that can handle large-scale data processing and provide a scalable and secure data repository.
Integration and Pricing
Azure DW makes it easy to integrate with a wide range of tools and services, including Apache Spark, Power BI, and Azure Machine Learning.
You can ingest big data and query data lakes with supported languages, enabling you to discover powerful insights. Integrations with third-party services like Tableau, SAS, and Qlik are also available.
Azure DW also offers seamless integration with Azure Stream Analytics, allowing you to query streaming data and conduct real-time analytics. This enables you to stay ahead of the game and make data-driven decisions quickly.
Integrations
Integrations with Apache Spark allow for the ingestion of big data and querying of data lakes with supported languages.
You can also integrate Power BI and Azure Machine Learning to discover powerful insights.
Azure Stream Analytics integrates with Azure Synapse for querying streaming data to conduct real-time analytics.
Azure Cosmos DB can be queried with Azure Synapse Link to run near real-time analytics over operational data.
Third-party services like Tableau, SAS, and Qlik can also be integrated for a seamless experience.
Pricing
Pricing for Azure Synapse Analytics can be optimized with the service level choice, allowing you to reduce costs with DWH pausing.
You can choose between pay-as-you-go and reserved capacity pricing options, which can save you up to 65% of costs.
Data storage is charged at $23/TB/month, with storage transactions not billed.
Compute pricing is based on provisioned resources with Compute Optimized Gen2.
The service level affects pricing, with two options available: ~37% and ~65%.
Data storage size includes data in your data warehouse and 7 days of incremental snapshot storage.
Geo-redundant disaster recovery starts at $0.057/GB/month.
Here's a breakdown of the pricing factors:
Frequently Asked Questions
What is cloud DW?
Cloud data warehouses (DW) are cloud-based systems that store, process, and integrate structured and semi-structured data. They often work in conjunction with cloud data lakes to collect and store unstructured data as well.
Is DW a database?
Yes, a data warehouse (DW) is a type of database that stores and integrates data from multiple sources. It's specifically designed for analytics, not just storing data like a traditional database.
Is Azure SQL a data warehouse?
Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly Azure Data Warehouse) is a cloud-based data warehousing solution, not Azure SQL. Azure SQL is a cloud-based relational database service, designed for transactional workloads, not data warehousing.
What is the new name for Azure SQL data warehouse?
The new name for Azure SQL Data Warehouse is Dedicated SQL pool, which is part of Azure Synapse Analytics. This name change reflects the service's expanded capabilities in enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics.
What is the difference between Azure SQL and Azure data warehouse?
Azure SQL is a relational database-as-a-service, while Azure Data Warehouse is a cloud-based, scale-out database designed for massive data processing. If you need to handle large volumes of data, Azure Data Warehouse is the better choice.
Sources
- https://docs.alation.com/en/latest/datasources/CustomDB/AzureDW.html
- https://k21academy.com/microsoft-azure/data-engineer/azure-synapse-analytics/
- https://www.scnsoft.com/data/data-warehouse/azure-synapse-analytics
- https://www.sqlshack.com/understanding-azure-synapse-analytics-formerly-sql-dw/
- https://www.projectpro.io/article/azure-sql-data-warehouse/714
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