How do you integrate Azure Purview in Azure Synapse Analytics?

This article explains how to integrate Azure Purview into your Azure Synapse workspace for data discovery and exploration. Follow the steps below to connect your Azure Purview account in your Azure Synapse Workspace.

In the Management Hub you will see now a new option called Azure Purview.

Click on the option  “Connect to a Purview Account”. Please be aware that you need a Contributor role in your Azure Synapse workspace and access to your Azure Purview Account(Purview Reader or Purview Curator).

Find the Purview account you want to connect to from the drop down list or add it manually by adding the source ID.

If the connection is successful, you will see the following screen. If not, make sure you have the correct role to connect to your Azure Purview account.

Data discovery:

If you select your Data, Develop or Integrate HUB, you will see in the top center a Search bar.

Using Azure Purview in Azure Synapse

To use Azure Purview in Azure Synapse it requires you to have access to the connected Azure Purview account. Azure Synapse will then passes-through the correct Azure Purview permissions.

Purview Reader role

• Can read all content in Azure Purview

Purview Curator role

• Can read all content in Azure Purview
• Can edit assets, classification and glossary terms
• Can apply classifications and glossary terms to assets.

Azure Purview actions

The following Azure Purview features are available in Azure Synapse Analytics(based on your role):

• Overview of the metadata
• View and edit schema of the metadata with classifications, glossary terms, data types, and descriptions
• View lineage to understand dependencies and do impact analysis. For more information about, see lineage
• View and edit Contacts to know who is an owner or expert over a dataset
• Related to understand the hierarchical dependencies of a specific dataset. This experience is helpful to browse through data hierarchy.

Connect data to Azure Synapse

Add addition to above features, you can also connect directly to the assets you have searched.

Linked Service

• Creating a new Linked Service will be required to copy data to Synapse or have them in your data hub (for supported data sources like ADLS Gen 2)

Integration Dataset

• For objects like files, folders, or tables, you can directly create a new Integration Dataset and leverage an existing linked service if already created.

Develop in Azure Synapse

There are three actions that you can perform: New SQL Script, New Notebook, and New Data Flow.

SQL Script

• View the top 100 rows in order to understand the shape of the data.
• Create an external table from Synapse SQL database.
• Load the data into a Synapse SQL database.

Notebook

• Load data into a Spark DataFrame.
• Create a Spark Table (if you do that over Parquet format, it also creates a serverless SQL pool table).

Data flow

• Create an integration dataset that can be used as a source in a data flow pipeline.

These new functionalities makes the integration between Azure Purview and Azure Synapse Analytics even more Powerful. More details can be found here.

Useful links

Create a Synapse workspace

Create an Azure Purview account

Thank you for reading, please feel free to ask questions and I’m more then happy to answer them.