Increasing Workload Group Concurrency Beyond 20 in Dedicated SQL Pool (500 DWU)

Question

Hello,

I am using a dedicated SQL pool in Azure Synapse with 500 DWU, and I would like to increase the "Concurrency range" for a workload group beyond 20.

According to the documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/sql-data-warehouse/memory-concurrency-limits), it seems that increasing the maximum concurrency above 20 requires upgrading to 1000 DWU.

I am wondering if it is possible to programmatically override this limit and set the maximum concurrency to 30 without increasing the DWU.

Thank you for your guidance.

Answer 1

Hi Michael Clemans,
Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.
Not possible - the workload group’s max concurrency is bounded by the service level. At DW500c the hard limit is 20 concurrent queries; anything above that is queued. To exceed 20, you must scale the pool (e.g., DW1000c raises the limit to 32).
If you want to do this programmatically for bursts, you can scale up and back down with T-SQL:

-- scale to DW1000c
ALTER DATABASE [YourDedicatedSqlPool]
MODIFY (SERVICE_OBJECTIVE = 'DW1000c');

-- later, scale back (example)
ALTER DATABASE [YourDedicatedSqlPool]
MODIFY (SERVICE_OBJECTIVE = 'DW500c');

Please let us know if there’s anything else we can assist you.