The Microsoft abstraction machine is at it again with this latest veneer over what we had come to understand as the 'modern data warehouse'. Or is it?! When creating an Azure PaaS data platform/analytics solution we would typically use a set of core Azure services; Data Factory, Data Lake, Databricks and SQL Data Warehouse. Now with the latest round of enhancements from the MPP team it seems in the third generation of the Azure SQLDW offering we can access all our core services as a bundle. Ok, so what? Well, this is a reasonable starting point to in our understanding of Azure Synapse, but is also far from the whole story. In this session we'll go deeper into the evolution of our SQLDW to complete our knowledge on why Synapse Analytics is a game changer for various data warehouse architectures. We'll discover what Synapse has to offer with its Data Virtualisation layer, flexible storage and multi model compute engines. A simple veneer of things, this new resource is not. In this introduction to Synapse we'll cover the what, that why and importantly the how for this emerging bundle of exciting services.