When you dive into Azure’s analytical ecosystem, you’ll encounter two
standout data stores tailor-made for your analytics needs: Azure
Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2.

With Azure Synapse Analytics, previously known as Azure SQL Data
Warehouse, you get a compilation of big data warehousing capabilities.
This platform allows you to swiftly scale resources up or down, paying
only for what you use. An integrated workspace in Synapse Ana-lytics
offers you a singular experience, blending big data and data
warehousing. Whether your workload demands on-demand query processing or
provisioned resources, Synapse Analytics

112 CHAPTER 4     Describe an analytics workload on Azure

accommodates both. What’s more, Synapse Studio lets you
explore your data on the fly, without the hassle of infrastructure
setups. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a vast, scalable, and secure
data lake optimized for big data analytics. The unique aspect of this
store is its hierarchical namespace, which combines the prowess of Azure
Blob Storage with a structured file system, thereby boosting analytics
performance. Security is paramount here. Integration with Azure Active
Directory, combined with POSIX-compliant access controls, ensures your
data’s sanctity. To top it off, tools like Azure Data Factory come to your aid for seamless data movement, making it easier for you to inte-grate with other Azure data services such as Azure Databricks or Azure HDInsight.