Almost lost in all the announcements from Ignite was a bunch of amazing new features that were added to the Provisioned Resources/SQL Pool section (read SQLDW functionalities) side of Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse). Here is a quick run-down of those features:
GA features:
- Performance: Result-set caching
- Performance: Materialized Views
- Performance: Ordered clustered columnstore index
- Heterogeneous data: JSON support
- Trustworthy computation: Dynamic Data Masking
- Continuous integration & deployment: SSDT support
- Language: Read committed snapshot isolation
Public Preview features:
- Workload management: Workload Isolation
- Data ingestion: Simple ingestion with COPY
- Data Sharing: Share DW data with Azure Data Share
- Trustworthy computation: Private LINK support
Private Preview features:
- Data ingestion: Streaming ingestion & analytics in DW
- Built-in ML: Native Prediction/Scoring
- Data lake enabled: Fast query over Parquet files
- Language: Updateable distribution column
- Language: FROM clause with joins
- Language: Multi-column distribution support
- Security: Column-level Encryption
Note: private preview features require whitelisting.
More info:
Azure SQL Data Warehouse releases new capabilities for performance and security
