Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Ignite Microsoft has pushed out Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB to general availability in an effort to bring its transactional NoSQL database closer to the analytics workhorse data warehouse. Teased in May last year, Microsoft said the link would comprise of two main components. Firstly, a Cosmos DB would house a column-oriented analytical store within containers in addition to the existing row-oriented transactional store. «The analytical store is fully isolated from the transactional store such that queries over the analytical store have no impact on your transactional workloads,» developers Ramnandan Krishnamurthy and Sri Chintala said in a blog post last year. Secondly, Azure Synapse Analytics would offer run-time support, that is, the «native integration» of the Azure Cosmos DB analytical store with the various analytics runtimes supported by Azure Synapse Analytics, such as Apache Spark and Synapse SQL serverless. The idea of running analytics on live transactional data is not new by any means. In the relational database world, just a couple of examples include MariaDB’s approach, involving holding columnar data in object storage within the database, and Oracle’s Cloud Data Science Platform, which performs analytics directly on its business application databases. Nonetheless, Synapase link for Azure CosmosDb — allowing punters to directly connect to their Azure Cosmos DB containers from Azure Synapse Analytics and access the analytical store with no separate connectors — was an important milestone for Microsoft, said Noel Yuhanna, veep and principal analyst at Forrester.
