Skip to main content

Announcing Azure Synapse Analytics public preview

Headshot of article author Arun Ulagaratchagan

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that Azure Synapse Analytics, the next generation of Azure SQL Data warehouse, is now available for public preview. Azure Synapse provides incredible performance over large data volumes and has built-in capabilities for data ingestion, data preparation, machine learning, and visualization, while accelerating time to value and reducing TCO. And it works seamlessly with Power BI!

The combination of Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI opens exciting new possibilities for bridging the gap between massive volumes of structured or unstructured data and actionable insights. You can create new reports or consume your existing Power BI datasets and reports, all within Synapse by simply linking your Power BI and Synapse workspaces. You can make any edits to your reports in Synapse and the changes will instantly propagate to all users. This tight integration between Power BI and Azure Synapse greatly reduces time to insights as BI Analysts and Data Engineers can collaborate easily in a single development environment.

Power BI integration within Azure Synapse

Looking ahead, we are continuing to invest in deep integration with Azure Synapse Analytics with enhancements that will make the e2e direct querying experience over big data highly performant.  One such investment is the automatic creation of materialized views in Synapse. The process of analyzing and creating materialized views to make queries performant is cumbersome.  With this new feature, Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics will determine and create the most optimal set of materialized views based on learning Power BI user queries and usage patterns. With materialized views residing in your SQL pool, you can be assured of your data always being fresh and any security changes instant. You will be able to achieve all this with just a few clicks in the Synapse studio!

Read more about Azure Synapse Analytics to experience limitless analytics with unmatched time to insight.