Microsoft is great at adding features and improving performance with many of their products. The previous named product Azure SQL DW became Azure Synapse Analytics recently and is in GA. There is another Azure Synapse Analytics around the Public Preview Workspace product.

So, there is still a single resource for a Massively Parallel Processing database in Azure. This is the resource with the (formerly SQL DW) list above.


The other Synapse is an analytics workspace that provides other applications besides the database. The database is created in a SQL Pool, but you also have Spark Pools. In addition to the database, there is a workspace to run ‘queries’ that has hooks for python and spark, a data integration engine (Data Factory) plus visualization with Power BI.


The main issue I found with the Public Preview workspace is that a database created in the formerly Azure SQL DW currently cannot be used in the workspace without importing into the workspace. This probably will be added in the future, but if you want to have both world, create the databases in the SQL Pool in the workspace not in the separate resource.