Understand cloud data functions

There are multiple audiences involved in an analytics conversation, including the typical seller, database architect, and infrastructure team. In addition, analytics solutions involve influencers, recommenders, and decision-makers from enterprise architecture, data science, business analysts, and executive leadership roles.

Azure Synapse Analytics enables the entire business, from the IT stakeholder to the business analyst, to collaborate on analytics solutions and understand cloud data functions. The following sections discuss these roles in more detail.

Database administrators and architects

Database administrators and architects are responsible for integrating and routing data sources into a centralized repository. These experts also handle the administration and performance required for the system, and the accessibility and efficiency of query and analytic modeling against that data.

Using Azure Synapse Analytics, database administrators can match their expanding responsibilities for data warehouses and data lakes. They can use familiar languages and tools, such as T-SQL, to run as many workloads as they want. They can assign resources to escalate critical workloads based on intelligent workload importance, workload isolation, and enhanced concurrency capabilities.

Infrastructure teams

These teams deal with the provisioning and architecture of the underlying compute resources required for large analytics systems. In many cases, they are managing transitions between datacenter-based and cloud-based systems, and current needs for interoperability across both. Disaster recovery, business continuity, and high availability are common concerns.

With Azure Synapse Analytics, IT professionals can protect and manage their organization's data more efficiently. They can enable big data processing with both on-demand and provisioned compute. Through tight integration with Microsoft Entra ID, the service helps secure access to cloud and hybrid configurations. IT professionals can enforce privacy requirements by using data masking along with row-level and column-level security.

Enterprise architects and data engineers

These teams are responsible for putting together complex solutions with components spanning integration across a wide swath of data tools and solutions. These include:

• Structured and unstructured data
• Transformation
• Storage and retrieval
• Analytic modeling
• Message-based middleware
• Data marts
• Geo-redundancy and data consistency
• Dashboards and reporting

Enterprise architects and data engineers are concerned with building effective architectures that work in an integrated manner. Such architectures preserve performance, availability, ease of administration, flexibility/extensibility, and actionability.

Data engineers can use Azure Synapse Analytics to simplify the steps to wrangle multiple data types from multiple sources, including streaming, transactional, and business data. They can use a code-free visual environment to connect to data sources and ingest, transform, and place data in the data lake.

Data scientists

Data scientists understand how to build advanced models for huge volumes of critical, yet often disparate data. Their work involves translating the needs of the business into the technology requirements for normalization and transformation of data. They create statistical and other analytical models, and ensure that line-of-business teams can get the analysis they need to run the business.

Using Azure Synapse Analytics, data scientists can build proofs of concept in minutes, and create or adjust end-to-end solutions. They can provision resources as needed, or query existing resources on demand across massive amounts of data. They can do their work in various languages, including T-SQL, R, Python, Scala, .NET, and Spark SQL.

Business analysts

These teams build and use dashboards, reports, and other forms of data visualization to gain rapid insights required for operations. Often, each line-of-business department will have dedicated business analysts who gather and package information and analytics from specialized applications. These specialized applications can be for credit cards, retail banking, commercial banking, treasury, marketing, and other organizations.

Using Azure Synapse Analytics, business analysts can securely access datasets and use Power BI to build dashboards. They can also securely share data within and outside their organization through Azure Data Share.

Executives

Executives are responsible for charting strategy and ensuring strategic initiatives are implemented effectively across both IT and line-of-business departments. Solutions must be cost-effective, prevent disruption to the business, allow for easy extensibility as requirements change and grow, and deliver results to the business.