Scale analytics with Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI
You've likely noticed the shift in terminology from business intelligence to modern analytics. This shift is due in part to the sheer volume of data generated that needs to be processed quickly, which wouldn't be possible with a traditional ETL, data warehousing, and reporting approach.
Modern analytics takes advantage of advances in computing both on premises and in the cloud. Large in-memory and specialized data stores have become increasingly affordable. These data stores use massively parallel processing, meaning that computations are completed in parallel, distributed across many processors or machines. Distributed processing leads to dramatic improvements in processing time. Additionally, the move to the cloud made it possible to acquire large amounts of computing power that can be turned on and off.
Modern analytics at scale
Azure Synapse Analytics is a unified, end-to-end solution for large scale data analytics. It brings together multiple technologies and capabilities, enabling you to combine the data integrity and reliability of a scalable, high-performance SQL Server based relational data warehouse with the flexibility of a data lake and open-source Apache Spark. Azure Synapse Analytics also includes native support for log and telemetry analytics with Azure Synapse Data Explorer pools, as well as built in data pipelines for data ingestion and transformation.
All Azure Synapse Analytics services can be managed through a single, interactive user interface called Azure Synapse Studio, which includes the ability to create interactive notebooks in which Spark code and markdown content can be combined. Synapse Analytics is a great choice when you want to create a single, unified analytics solution on Azure.
Looking beyond data exploration and into reporting and data use, Power BI and Azure Synapse are natively integrated. Using Power BI with Synapse enables analysts to process large-scale data quickly.
Note
Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI are not Microsoft's only tools for scaling analytics. They are however the main tools used by data analysts in scalable modern analytics solutions. Learn more about large-scale data analytics solutions in Explore fundamentals of modern data warehousing.