In a world where we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, real-time data is more critical than ever before. Not only is it expensive to store old data, but its shelf-life is decreasing. Outdated data can lead to poor decisions and poor outcomes, so you need fresh data to gain the most relevant insights.
As data sources grow in size, speed, and complexity, the rate of scalability becomes just as significant as the insights themselves.
The use of real-time data allows businesses to act in a similarly fast way. They can identify trends as they happen and make immediate adjustments to dynamic products, campaigns, and more. Analytics also enables brands to be proactive in customer retention efforts and improve customer experience by responding to their most recent actions, purchases, and level of engagement.
Cloud-scale analytics is the current go-to technique for transforming large amounts of information into actionable insights with real commercial value. One such solution is Microsoft Azure Synapse. Let’s take a closer look at Azure Synapse and the key features that every data engineer should know.
What is Azure Synapse?
Azure Synapse is an end-to-end cloud analytics solution that combines fresh streaming data with historical data to give comprehensive analysis in real-time.
It is an analytics service that combines enterprise data warehousing, data integration, and Big Data analytics. Azure Synapse bridges the gap between these worlds by providing a consistent experience for ingesting, preparing, managing, and serving data for Business Intelligence and Machine Learning needs.
By integrating information from any data source, data warehouse, or big data analytics platform, Synapse enables data engineers to use their data much more efficiently, productively, quickly, and securely. Azure Synapse eliminates team silos by providing a unified analytics experience that supports data engineering on a single platform.
Azure Synapse vs. Other Cloud Vendors
Several providers offer cloud warehousing services. Each vendor provides notable differences as well as a tested method to make them accessible and efficient for all of your data users. So, how does Azure Synapse stack up against other vendors?
Snowflake
Snowflake is not limited to a single cloud and will instead function on top of three main cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Azure Synapse, on the other hand, is designed exclusively for Azure Cloud. It’s built from scratch to work with other Azure services. Although Snowflake integrates with many of these services, it lacks some features that make Synapse’s integration with Azure simple.
Redshift
Under various demand levels, Redshift and Azure Synapse function admirably. You should complete benchmarks with your own data, but you’ll probably find that both systems can manage most businesses’ workloads quite well.
3 benefits of Azure Synapse?
1. Preparation of Data
Successful analytic initiative depends on the proper preparation of data before the analysis process. Even though this process is done with caution, the risk of missing vital pieces of information could be prevalent. Therefore, data analytics tools help overcome this risk by bringing all data sources together, such as Excel queries and data modeling. Once the required data is centralized, analytics tools can efficiently cleanse it to ensure the data is:
- Complete
- Accurate
- Up-to-date
- Properly formatted
- Free of repetitive and irrelevant information.
2. Data Visualization
Data Visualization is considered one of the primary uses of a data analytics tool. Visualizations assist the organization in understanding complex information, uncovering critical insights, and arriving at better decisions. Organizations can therefore obtain trends and patterns that would have been hard to uncover otherwise.
3. Sharing Business Intelligence
When you obtain insights from data visualization, the reporting software assists in sharing the business intelligence among the organization’s internal and external stakeholders. Reporting software is part of the data analytics toolkit, which enables you to efficiently publish the results of data analysis, embed visuals, and implement overall access control to allocate the required permissions.
4 Key Features of Azure Synapse That Every Data Engineer Should Know
1. No-code ELT Pipeline Construction
The crucial aspect of ELT is that the data preparation, aggregation and other manipulation, is performed by the data warehouse or lake, and not before the data is loaded to it. ELT is especially relevant for cloud based use cases that can leverage cloud native data warehouses or lakes with elastic scaling, to better handle data processing at scale.
2. Real-time Streaming Capabilities
Azure Synapse has added Spark functionality to address complex data engineering requirements. It’s now possible to use popular languages like Python, Scala, and SQL to process real-time streaming data. In Synapse, you can process streaming data in a variety of ways.
3. Link for SQL
Azure Synapse Link for SQL enables real-time analytics over your operational data in Azure SQL Database or SQL Server 2022. Azure Synapse Link for SQL allows you to run analytics, business intelligence, and deep learning cases on your performance information with minimal impact on source databases, thanks to easy integrations.
4. Map Data
With the help of the guided experience offered by Map Data, you can easily create a flexible mapping data flow that Synapse pipelines can execute.
Equalum + Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse Analytics relies heavily on the quality and relevance of the data that it receives. To stay ahead of the competition and achieve operational excellence, you need to continuously feed the analytics platform with fresh data.
Using industry-leading CDC, Equalum captures data from leading enterprise sources and replicates it in real-time to Synapse Analytics. Our platform also offers robust in-flight transformations, so you can enrich, aggregate, and filter your data before it reaches Azure. Equalum orchestrates the entire process, while providing real-time monitoring and alerting to ensure pipeline health and an uninterrupted flow of fresh data.
- Replicate data to Synapse Analytics using ultra-fast binary based CDC
- Enterprise-grade monitoring and alerting
- Ensure data integrity with exactly once processing
Stream in Real Time With Equalum
Equalum’s enterprise-grade, real-time data streaming platform offers an end-to-end solution for data collection, transformation, manipulation, and synchronization. Equalum combines the strength of top open source projects with our unique data intake capabilities to securely and effectively transport data in real-time or batch to suit your needs.
Can’t wait to see how this works? Book a demo or try it for free today.