Microsoft has rolled out a range of new tools and services, including Azure Synapse — an analytics toolkit that lets users query both relational and non-relational data at petabyte-scale using the SQL language.

Unveiled at Microsoft’s Ignite event in Florida this week, Azure Synapse was one of a several product releases, including Azure Arc – which lets users tap the Azure Resource Manager to deploy applications on Linux or Windows servers irrespective of where they are running – released at the event.

Azure SynapseAzure Synapse

Azure Synapse appears to be an evolution of Microsoft’s existing Azure SQL Data Warehouse, with a range of bells and whistles added on, including BI and Databricks integrations.

Microsoft  describes it as letting users “quickly implement a high-performance, globally available, and secure cloud data warehouse… [it is] first and only analytics system to have run all TPC-H queries at petabyte-scale.”

(TPC-H is a transaction processing and database benchmark run by the Transaction Processing Performance Council.)

“You can independently scale compute and storage, while pausing and resuming your data warehouse within minutes through a massively parallel processing architecture designed for the cloud,” Microsoft said.

Various integrations and an “Azure Synapse studio” let users conduct data prep, data management, data warehousing, big data, and AI tasks, with a code-free visual environment for managing data pipelines.

“Database administrators can automate query optimization. Data scientists can build proofs of concept in minutes. Business analysts can securely access datasets and use Power BI to build dashboards in minutes, all while using the same analytics service.” the company adds in a product description.

Storage is charged at £110.813/1 TB/month (£0.16/1 TB/hour). Data storage includes the size of your data warehouse and 7-days of incremental snapshot storage; storage transactions are not billed. Synapse tools are priced at anywhere between £1.126/hour and £337.625/hour depending on which cloud resources are deployed.

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