I have not done any serious big data work in many years and I'm using this post to understand the Azure options and update my skills.
Azure Synapse Analytics - built for limitless scale for unstructured and structure data for big data - supports petabyte analytics. Ingest and prepare data for BI. Instance can be a dedicated or serverless PaaS service. Data lake Gen 2 assigned to each synapse instance. GA Dec 2020.
- SQL Serverless Pools is pay be use/pay per query. Can use SSMS to manage data. Good for small or new data ware housing. T-SQL works perfectly so simple for smaller projects or PoCs.
- Go from 3NF in relational data to using Fact and dimension tables to put data into a star model for MPP.
- Data Warehouse Units (DW) - Same as DTU, made up of CPU, Mem, IO. Simple to upgrade. Lowest is DW100 can be huge, and simple to scale up and down. More DW's means more VM's/work process work on the data.