Azure Synapse Analytics is an analytics service that manages data for business applications. It was launched at Ignite last year and the Studio element of the service came later and also in preview. Microsoft says now both Azure Synapse Analytics and Synapse Studio are reaching GA. This announcement came yesterday following an online event hosted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He believes data and analytics will drive the ongoing digital transformation across enterprise. Services like Azure Synapse make digital transitions easier by streamlining data for organizations and automatically prepares and manages data for business intelligence applications. Microsoft describes it as an extension of Azure SQL Data Warehouse as it leverages analytic data from warehouse systems across organizations. “Today, businesses are forced to maintain two types of analytical systems — data warehouses and data lakes. Data warehouses provide critical insights on business health. Data lakes can uncover important signals on customers, products, employees, and processes,” said Azure Data corporate vice president Rohan Kumar in a blog post at the time. “Both are critical.” Synapse Analytics comes with a dedicated workspace called Azure Synapse studio. Here customers can access tools for managing data, big data, AI tasks, and more. Additionally, users have the ability to manage data pipelines from data sets.
Azure Purview
Microsoft has also revealed Azure Purview is arriving in preview. Previously known as “Project Bablylon” internally, this tool can be used seperately or within Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Purview provides more data governance to cloud customers by tapping into the Microsoft Information Protection service. According to the company, the new tool can help organizations protect data more broadly. For example, it will help protect data coming from non-Microsoft services:
