Providing “Insights for All” with Azure Synapse Analytics

TimeXtender is proud of the work we have advanced across the global business community to help provide instant access to trusted data in the cloud -- using Microsoft Azure -- to approved users within an organization. Over the years, we have discussed the importance of empowering business users to have data at their fingertips so that they can make better business decisions with data, mind and heart. As we know, to accomplish this endeavor, having your analytics data in the cloud makes so much sense for so many reasons.

Today, the purpose of analytics is to provide insights for all. For this reason, as a long-time Microsoft Gold Data Platform Partner, we’re excited to share the news from Microsoft that Azure Synapse Analytics is moving to the public preview phase as announced here.

Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. Azure Synapse aligns these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

With Azure Synapse, you can align team, data, and skills together into one, unified analytics solution to seamlessly and securely collaborate, share and analyze data. Azure Synapse brings these two divided worlds together into a single service, which not only simplifies a business’s analytics platform, but also breaks down siloes that exist today.

Breaking Down Siloes

Team Siloes - One, unified analytics solution with Azure Synapse to seamlessly and securely collaborate, share, and analyze data.

Data Siloes - All data…structured, semi-structured, unstructured can be brought into Azure and queried – regardless of data type.

Skill Siloes -- Bringing data skills together into a single service—those familiar with SQL can continue using SQL and those that prefer Python, Scala, SparkSQL, or C++ can do so as well…all from the same analytics service to Azure Synapse for accelerated analytics.

TimeXtender believes Azure Synapse Analytics is the best platform for large scale analytics in the cloud and that we offer the best way to integrate and transform data on that platform.

Using TimeXtender with Azure Synapse Analytics

As explained in this reference architecture on the Microsoft Azure site, for users of TimeXtender, this means our solution allows them to define a data estate using a graphical user interface, with definitions stored in a metadata repository. Using TimeXtender, the code for building the data estate is generated automatically, while remaining fully customizable. The end-result is a modern data estate -- aligned seamlessly with Azure Synapse Analytics – that gives you the full capability for advanced, cloud-scale analytics and AI.

TimeXtender builds on Azure Synapse Analytics by adding intelligence to the creation of data pipelines, accelerating data engineering, and automatically documenting the results.

Intelligent – Because TimeXtender remembers your business logic, not only can it intelligently deploy the right code to the right platform, it orchestrates the entire process, learning from experience and improving load times with each successive execution. This has several implications:

• Building data pipelines can be accomplished with lower cost resources who are not required to be coding experts.
• Our customers can easily leverage new technologies and keep up with increasing demands for data.
• Customers can upgrade an existing TimeXtender project from on-premises SQL Server or Azure SQL Database onto Azure Synapse Analytics with zero rework or downtime.
• TimeXtender users have the option to utilize different data platforms/services for development, testing and production. For instance, use SQL Server for development, Azure SQL Database for testing – and then deploy to production on Azure Synapse Analytics. We handle all the code translation for you.

Accelerated – TimeXtender utilizes a simplified drag and drop interface to define data operations without requiring coding skills. Instead, TimeXtender writes code for the user – reducing development and debugging time. And because TimeXtender generates metadata to describe the data and transformations, it:

• Greatly accelerates the process of defining data pipelines
• Can be used to build Power BI datasets and Analysis Services models for self-service analytics

Documented – as the user defines data connections, integrations, transformations and targets – TimeXtender builds a metadata repository that can be used to document the resulting analytics data estate. The result is:

• Complete auto-generated documentation that supports both data governance and maintenance efforts
• A data dictionary for analytics – which can be viewed in PowerBI
• Full end-to-end data lineage and impact analysis

TimeXtender helps companies build cloud scale analytics on Azure Synapse by providing an integrated data management platform that accelerates time to data insights by up to 10 times. Going beyond everyday Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) or Extract, Load and Transform (ELT) by providing automation and capabilities for data access, modeling and documentation in a single platform, Discovery Hub® provides a cohesive data fabric for cloud scale analytics, allowing you to connect and integrate various data silos, catalog, model, move, and document data for analytics and AI.  Learn more about TimeXtender.