Good News for Microsoft Azure Synapse Users

Microsoft announced the Availability of Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Database

2 min readJul 6, 2022

Good news for all Azure and Azure Synapse Analytics users, especially the Data Engineers among us. With Link for SQL, data integration can become much more relaxed.

Azure Synapse Link was already usable for Azure Cosmos DB and is a cloudnative Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing (HTAP) capability and is now also available for SQL Server and AZure SQL Database. It enables you the possibility of real-time analytics. Azure Synapse Link provides seamless integration between your databases and Azure Synapse Analytics [1].

Architecture of Azure Synapse Link — Image Source: Microsoft[1]

For companies using Azure that could mean that often time-consuming building of ETL and ELT could be dispensed or at least reduced. Microsoft provides you the possibility of low/no-code, near real-time data replication from your SQL-based operational stores into Azure Synapse Analytics.

The Benefits of this Solution

Benefit 1: Simplified Data Integration: Azure Synapse Link allows you to directly access other data storages without any data movement. All the data updates appear in the analytics store in real-time without ETL or change feed requests [1].

Benefit 2: Analyzing Real Time: Normal ETL or ELT based data processes are typically characterized by longer wait times. Here, you query against the data in real time directly on the database.

Optimized Analytics Workloads: Azure SQL and Azure Cosmos DB analytics storage is optimized to provide scalability, elasticity, and performance for analytics workloads without any dependency on compute runtimes [1]. With Azure Synapse Analytics, accessing this storage tier provides simplicity and high performance.

Cost Benefits: Using Azure Synapse Link, you can directly analyze data in the database without additional storage and compute tiers required by traditional ETL pipelines to analyze operational data.

Summary

This is a very useful new feature and a great service that Azure is now increasingly offering here. Microsoft is following the same path as Google, for example, with BigQuery Omni, which is even platform-independent with Google BigLake. This is also great news for all Azure analysts and engineers as well as a logical step to keep up with Google.

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