Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft's analytics platform that combines a SQL data warehouse, Spark pools, pipelines, and workspace UX. Teams often mean Synapse dedicated SQL pools (warehouse) or serverless SQL over the lake when they say "Synapse."
ADLS Gen2 --> Synapse (SQL / Spark / Pipelines) --> Power BI
Pieces freshers confuse
- Dedicated SQL pool: provisioned warehouse (DWUs)
- Serverless SQL: pay-per-query over files in the lake
- Spark pools: notebooks / big data transforms
- Synapse Pipelines: orchestration (ADF-related)
Synapse vs Snowflake
| Topic | Synapse | Snowflake | |---|---|---| | Home | Azure-centric platform | Multi-cloud warehouse SaaS | | Scope | Warehouse + Spark + pipelines in one workspace | Focused warehouse (+ Snowpark ecosystem) | | Lake | Tight ADLS integration / serverless SQL | External stages / Iceberg options; storage separate | | Compute | DWUs / Spark pools / serverless | Virtual warehouses (credits) | | BI | Deep Power BI integration | Works with Power BI and many BI tools |
Interview tip: Describe Synapse as Azure's unified analytics workspace (SQL + Spark + pipelines), then contrast Snowflake as a specialized multi-cloud warehouse with clean storage/compute separation.