Earlier this week I went to my first in person event for a long time. The Leeds M365 user group held their first in person event now things are opening up in the UK.
Simon Doy asked me to speak at the event and I took the opportunity to talk about Azure Synapse. Now Im not a data expert but recently I needed to learn about Azure Synapse so I could help a customer build an Enterprise Data Platform based around Microsoft cloud technologies and I was also looking to automate the build and management of the platform with Azure DevOps so I had a big learning curve to find out about the technology and key use cases for it.
One if the things that I felt on this learning journey was that there is a need to help people who are not day to day data and analytics experts understand what synapse is and to demistify the reference architectures and use cases to help understand how you can use Synapse and get value from it.
I thought of the idea to bring together this talk based on what I have learnt and the few blog articles I have written and I hoped that it would by the end of the talk help the audience over that first learning hurdle to get started and also to help them know some of what you can do with Synapse and to understand a bigger picture of where it would fit in a real world solution.
The talk went pretty well and there was a load of good discussion with members of the audience so I was really happy with my first attempt at talking about a technology I havent worked with for very long.
the slides from the talk are below and maybe I will get a change to do it again if any user groups are looking for a similar talk.
