Dedicated SQL Pool in Azure Synapse Analytics

In this post, we are going to discuss about Dedicated SQL Pool (formerly known as SQL DW) in Azure Synapse Analytics. Microsoft launched Azure Synapse Analytics as a platform which reflects the changing analytics landscape. Today’s analytics workloads and requirements have evolved from the more traditional data warehousing concepts of nightly ETL (Extract Transform Load) to more hybrid scenarios which may include scenarios such as real-time data streaming and analyzing massive amounts of data stored in various formats.

Dedicated SQL Pool (formerly SQL DW) is a collection of features which enable the implementation of the more traditional Enterprise Data Warehousing platform using Azure Synapse Analytics. As the name suggests, Dedicated SQL pool is a collection of resources measured in Data Warehousing Units(DWUs),  provisioned using Synapse SQL. To know more about DWUs and Synapse Analytics architecture, please read my previous post here.

Dedicated SQL pool uses columnar storage and relational tables to store data which enables it to store and analyze massive amounts of data. The benefits of using columnar storage is that it reduces the amount of storage required, thereby reducing overall storage costs while improving query performance at the same time. Dedicated SQL pool utilizes PolyBase to import from data sources such as Hadoop and Spark.

Reference: What is dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW)? – Azure Synapse Analytics | Microsoft Docs