Ignite 2021 Announcements: Accelerate time-to-insight with Azure Synapse Analytics

Microsoft

Nov 02, 2021

As businesses worldwide navigate a new normal, data teams find themselves pressured to deliver transformative insights quicker than ever. Customer interactions are increasingly digital and multi-channel, supply chains are constantly adapting to changing demand, and operations are being reconfigured to accommodate remote and hybrid work. Business agility has never been more critical. And data teams are being asked to create new solutions, accelerate project deployments, and deliver real-time insights to power that agility.

For Ignite 2021, we’ve focused on delivering new features that enable data teams to deliver insights to the business faster than ever. Here is the summary of the latest innovations on Azure Synapse.

Log & Telemetry Analytics

Telemetry data is everywhere: IoT sensors, app logs, web logs, infra logs, security logs, metrics, click streams, time series data, business events, and more. This data drives innovation and improvement in the devices that consumers and businesses rely upon. And as organizations worldwide seek to be more agile, telemetry data provides the early signals for possible pivots.

Today we are announcing the availability of Azure Synapse data explorer, which provides customers with an interactive query experience to unlock insights from log and telemetry data. To complement our existing SQL and Apache Spark engines, the Azure Synapse data explorer engine is optimized for efficient log analytics using powerful indexing technology to automatically index free-text and semi-structured data commonly found in logs.

See our documentation for more information on Azure Synapse data explorer.

Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse

Starting today, Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse is now generally available.. This capability enables customers using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 to automatically bring their Dataverse data into Azure Synapse to perform advanced analytics tasks. With a few clicks, data from Dataverse will land in Azure Synapse for analytics exploration without putting unnecessary load on the operational databases—no ETL processes, pipelines, or management overhead.

See our documentation for more information on Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse.

Database templates

Beginning today, customers can now use database templates in Azure Synapse for specific industries to make integration of different data sources easier. New projects can leverage out-of-the-box database templates that address a wide variety of different business areas with great details. Existing projects that need to address new requirements can also leverage this capability to bring in information from the templates. Customers can then take the next step and implement these templates over data residing in the analytics engines in Azure Synapse, as well as with Power BI.

See our documentation for more information on database templates.

Apache Spark in Synapse

Hardware-accelerated clusters will be available in public preview for Apache Spark in Azure Synapse starting next week. By leveraging GPU hardware, you can reduce the time necessary to run data integration pipelines, score ML models, and more. This means less time waiting for data to process and more time identifying insights to drive better business outcomes. These GPU-accelerated Spark pools provide performance improvements for ETL and ML workloads with built-in support for NVIDIA Rapids and integration with Microsoft’s Hummingbird for Spark.

See our documentation for more information on GPU-accelerated Spark pools in Synapse.

Delta Lake

Delta Lake support is now generally available on Azure Synapse.

As the central analytics hub for organizations, Azure Synapse empowers data teams with serverless SQL capabilities. With this capability, business users can query Delta Lake files using SQL and no longer worry about managing compute, waiting for notebooks to start, or even think about manually pausing/resuming clusters.

See our documentation for more information on Delta Lake support.

Machine Learning

Customers now have even more opportunities to drive value with machine learning built directly into their Apache Spark pools in Azure Synapse. Additionally, data professionals in Synapse can now leverage pre-built AI with the built-in integration of Azure Cognitive Services, now generally available. This includes support for a large range of Cognitive Services capabilities, such as Translator and Form Recognizer.

See our documentation for more information on machine learning in Synapse.

10 Days of Azure Synapse

Be sure to follow the Azure Synapse TechCommunity page to get daily updates on the latest blogs and tutorials. As part of Microsoft Ignite, we will be posting a blog each day for the next 10 days focused on the latest announcements and how to get started.