BI: DataWeek starting soon - don't miss it

I was really excited today to see details of the upcoming #dataweek. Anything with a name like that already has my interest.

In this case though, there’s a #CreateData event that’s happening as part of #dataweek. And the focus of that looks to be on Azure Synapse Analytics.

Azure Synapse Analytics

I know that many of my readers won’t have spent much time with Azure Synapse Analytics. The product has grown out of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (note not Azure SQL Database) but it’s now much more than just an upgraded Azure SQL DW.

It’s a tool that combines data warehousing with Big Data analytics. So many of the early Big Data offerings struck me as just Big Hype. I wrote about that back in 2013. And early last year, I wrote about my concern that about how “modern” seems to be treated as a synonym for “better”, but it certainly isn’t. And Big Data was an example for me, in particular Hadoop.

My real concern was that most of these tools were only addressing a small part of what was needed.

Why Azure Synapse Analytics ?

One key advantage of Azure Synapse Analytics is that it tackles both the data warehousing and Big Data needs, in a single product. That’s far more useful. And it’s trying to do it without a lot of moving data around, as that introduces latency.

I spent the last two weeks on a DevOps project focussing on building and deploying Azure Synapse Analytics projects. I was impressed by how mature the tooling now was, compared to when I’d last looked at it.

If you’re not across where this product is at, I’d encourage you to consider registering for #dataweek.

2020-11-25