Do you remember those books that teach you how to prepare delicious meals with the ingredients you have at your disposal? I'm sure we all have at least one on our shelves.

What makes a chef's book so important: it includes information on the best seasonings for different types of dishes and cuisines, as well as which flavor combinations work well together, and why. It also offers explanations of what certain ingredients taste like, which can be helpful if you’re working with a new ingredient.

This session follows that same pattern - based on real-life scenarios, by sticking with the "challenge -> solution" approach, I'll show you how to "cook" and "serve" efficient Azure Synapse Analytics "meals".

How to set the proper table distribution option in the Dedicated SQL pool? How to directly query the data stored in the Azure Data Lake, by writing plain old T-SQL code? Why Parquet format is a more "nutritive" ingredient than CSV? How to visualize the data from the Spark notebooks directly in Synapse?

These are just some of the challenges that all of us are facing frequently - and where the chef's book provides the best recipes!