Creating Apache Synapse Analytics Workspace

In continuation to our previous article in this article, we will investigate how to create our first synapse workspace. I strongly recommend you have a look at my previous article where we have discussed the basics of Azure synapse analytics and what can be done through it. To get started with azure synapse you must first create a workspace. Workspace is the top-level object which holds all the data prep, management, and studio for your synapse workload.

We are going to create a new azure synapse analytics workspace under a new resource group which I created for this demo.

Open Azure portal and type “azure synapse” you can click the link below to start.

You will be getting the below screen once you select the options, I mentioned in the previous step.

The workspace asks for the ADLS storage to be mapped with and we must create a new gen2 storage account if not already available as it is mandatory. There is another field I have marked in the below image which is the ‘File system name’ which acts as a container that holds all our files that must be saved in the Data lake storage. Hierarchically it comes under the data lake storage - workspace name - container name.

The ‘Managed resource group’ in the above image (arrowed) is a container that holds the resources to support our workspace. The azure synapse analytics, in the background, creates many processes and temporary objects that will be placed under the managed resource group. The naming of this is optional, if you choose to leave it the system creates a resource group under a random name like below. You can see there is a new resource group that has been created by azure in the below image.

Now the azure synapse workspace has been created, let's open the synapse studio. One of the ways to open the azure synapse studio is to go into your newly created synapse analytics workspace and click on the ‘Open synapse studio’ link.

The other simpler ways are to access by typing through the URL ‘web.azuresynapse.net’ in your browser or simply clicking the link given in the workspace web URL. When you navigate into this URL it will automatically show you the options for you to select your subscription and workspace name.

You can see the options in the left pane for the navigation buttons like Data, Develop, Integrate, Monitor, and Manage. It looks similar to what we saw at azure data factory studio but with some additional options. We can click on the data button and see our linked DataLake storage and the containers under it, that we have mapped to this synapse analytics workspace.

Summary

This is a very basic article on creating our first synapse analytics workspace. There are more to come in the coming weeks, stay tuned.

Reference

Microsoft official docs