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 maybe SQL Data Warehouse. Now with the latest round of enhancements from the MPP team and others it seems in the third generation of the Azure SQLDW offering we can access all these core services as a bundle. We might even call it a Kappa architecture! Ok, so what? Well, this is a reasonable starting point in our understanding of what Azure Synapse Analytics is, but it is also far from the whole story. In this session we will go deeper into the evolution of our SQLDW to complete our knowledge on why Synapse Analytics is a game changer for various data platform architectures. We’ll discover what Synapse has to offer with its Data Virtualisation layer, flexible storage, and variety of compute engines. A simple veneer of things, this new resource is not. In this introduction to Synapse we will cover the what, that why and importantly the how for this emerging bundle of exciting technology. Finally, we’ll touch on Microsoft’s latest thinking for a HTAP environment with direct links into our transactional data stores.