January 2021

Synapse Analytics: One Workspace to Rule Them All?

Azure Synapse just went GA promising to unify the whole analytics stack in one workspace. It's a genuinely compelling vision — and, a month in, an unevenly-realised one. Here's the honest state of it.

Serverless SQL in Synapse: Querying the Lake Without Moving It

For years, querying data in a lake meant first loading it somewhere you could run SQL. Synapse's serverless SQL pool kills that step — point T-SQL straight at the files, pay per query, move nothing. Here's when it's brilliant and when it isn't.