How to combine two Azure Synapse instances without migrating data?

Question

I currently have two separate instances of Azure Synapse that contains databases with similar names and structures. I would like to access them combined without migrating the data of one to the other (using ADF). Is there are way to link those two separate instances together, and appear as one instance?

Answer 1

You can use external tables which are a type of table that points to data that is stored outside of Azure Synapse Analytics. Suppose that ypu create this table :

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE Sales (
    CustomerID INT,
    ProductID INT,
    Quantity INT,
    Price DECIMAL(10,2)
)
LOCATION ('https://instancea.synapse.net/Sales/;
                 https://instanceb.synapse.net/Sales/')
FILE_FORMAT = PARQUET

You can query it as if it were a regular table in Azure Synapse Analytics. :

SELECT * FROM Sales

In this way, Azure Synapse Analytics will automatically merge the data from the two separate Azure Synapse instances into a single result set.