Cloud data warehouses · Microsoft Corporation

Azure Synapse Analytics

Microsoft's unified analytics service combining a dedicated SQL data warehouse, serverless SQL, and Apache Spark pools.

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Azure Synapse Analytics is Microsoft's analytics service for enterprise data warehousing and big data processing on Azure. It offers dedicated SQL pools for predictable, provisioned MPP data warehousing measured in Data Warehouse Units (DWUs); serverless SQL pools that query data already sitting in a data lake and bill only for data processed; and Spark pools for large-scale data engineering and ML in Scala, Python, or .NET. Synapse Pipelines provide built-in data integration and orchestration, and Synapse Studio gives one workspace for SQL, Spark, and pipeline development. Microsoft now positions Microsoft Fabric as its newer, SaaS-first successor, but Synapse remains generally available and widely deployed. It runs only as an Azure-hosted service.

At a glance

Vendor Microsoft Corporation
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier No
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for Azure-centric enterprises needing both provisioned data warehousing and ad hoc lake querying in one service.

Pricing

Dedicated SQL pools bill per DWU-hour with pay-as-you-go or 1-/3-year reserved options; serverless SQL pools bill per TB of data processed with a 10 MB minimum per query; Spark pools bill per vCore-hour.

Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.

Features

  • Dedicated (provisioned) SQL pools measured in DWUs
  • Serverless SQL pools querying data lake files on demand
  • Native Apache Spark pools for data engineering and ML
  • Built-in Synapse Pipelines for data integration and orchestration
  • Unified Synapse Studio workspace for SQL, Spark, and pipelines
  • Deep integration with Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage
  • Workload management and resource classes for query prioritization

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Microsoft Fabric Microsoft's SaaS analytics platform unifying warehousing, lakehouse, pipelines, Power BI, and real-time analytics on OneLake. Amazon Redshift AWS's managed cloud data warehouse, available as provisioned clusters or an auto-scaling serverless option. Google BigQuery Serverless cloud data warehouse billed by data scanned or by slot capacity, with no infrastructure to provision.

Azure Synapse Analytics in the index now

Terms to know

Data warehouse A centralized, structured database optimized for fast historical reporting rather than day-to-day transactions. Data lake A storage repository that holds raw data of any format cheaply, with structure applied only when the data is read. ETL (extract, transform, load) A data integration pattern that transforms data before loading it, unlike ELT which transforms after loading. OLAP (online analytical processing) A category of technology optimized for fast, multi-dimensional aggregation and slicing of data for analysis. Apache Spark An open-source distributed computing engine for processing large datasets in parallel across a cluster of machines.

Related guides

How to choose a cloud data warehouse Start from your cloud, your pricing tolerance and your workload shape — general BI, high-concurrency apps, or enterprise mixed workloads — not the feature list.