Dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) in Azure Synapse Analytics frequently asked questions

Azure Synapse is an analytics service that brings together data warehousing and Big Data analytics. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for BI and machine learning needs. For more information, see, What is Azure Synapse Analytics.

Azure Synapse is Azure SQL Data Warehouse evolved. We've taken the same industry-leading data warehouse to a whole new level of performance and capabilities. You can continue running your existing data warehouse workloads in production with dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) in Azure Synapse. For more information, see What is Azure Synapse Analytics.

Dedicated SQL pool refers to the standalone platform of enterprise data warehousing features that are generally available with Azure Synapse. For more information, see What is Azure Synapse Analytics. A dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) is a standalone or connected service outside of an Azure Synapse workspace. You can also create dedicated SQL pools in your Azure Synapse workspace.

Not all features of the dedicated SQL pool in Azure Synapse workspaces apply to a standalone dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW), and vice versa. For more information, see What's the difference between Azure Synapse dedicated SQL pools (formerly SQL DW) and dedicated SQL pools in an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace?. To enable Azure Synapse workspace features for an existing dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW), refer to How to enable a workspace for your dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW).

You can get started with an Azure free account or contact sales for more information.

Azure Synapse offers several solutions for protecting data such as TDE and auditing. For more information, see Security.

Visit the Microsoft Compliance page for various compliance offerings by product such as SOC and ISO. First, choose by Compliance title. Then expand Azure in the Microsoft in-scope cloud services section on the right side of the page to see what services are Azure Synapse compliant.

Yes! Though Power BI supports direct query with Azure Synapse, it's not intended for a large number of users or real-time data. To optimize Power BI performance further, consider using Power BI on top of Azure Analysis Services or Analysis Service IaaS.

See our current capacity limits page.

Several factors can influence the time for compute management operations. A common case for long running operations is transactional rollback. When a scale or pause operation is initiated, all incoming sessions are blocked and queries are drained. In order to leave the system in a stable state, transactions must be rolled back before an operation can commence. The greater the number and larger the log size of transactions, the longer the operation will be stalled restoring the system to a stable state.

If you have a feature request, submit it on our UserVoice page

For help with developing with Azure Synapse, you can ask questions on our Stack Overflow page.

Support Tickets can be filed through Azure portal.

See data types.

Many features are supported. Features that aren't supported can be found in Unsupported Table Features.

Yes. Most REST functionality that can be used with SQL Database is also available with dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW). You can find API information within REST documentation pages or Databases.

Driver support for dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) can be found on the Connection Strings page

Orc, RC, Parquet, and flat delimited text

Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure Storage Blobs

No, PolyBase only interacts with the storage components.

HDI can use either ADLS or WASB as the HDFS layer. If you have either as your HDFS layer, you can load that data into a dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW). However, you cannot generate pushdown computation to the HDI instance.

Next steps

For more information on dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW) in Azure Synapse, see our Overview page.