New in Azure Synapse Analytics: CICD for SQL Analytics using SQL Server Data Tools
At Microsoft Ignite 2019, we announced Azure Synapse Analytics, a major evolution of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The same industry leading data warehouse now provides a whole new level of performance, scale, and analytics capabilities. One of these capabilities is SQL Analytics, which provides a rich set of enterprise data warehousing features.
Today we are announcing the general availability of the highest requested feature for SQL Analytics in Azure Synapse, SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) database projects. This release includes support for SQL Server Data Tools with Visual Studio 2019 along with native platform integration with Azure DevOps providing built-in continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) capabilities for enterprise level deployments. This announcement also comes with support for the Schema Compare extension in Azure Data Studio for SQL Analytics. You can now expect a frictionless development and deployment experience on any platform for your analytics solution.
Since announcing preview support for SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), customers have been able to use popular SQL Server Data Tools features such as Schema Compare, build, and publish for local development of their data warehouse. Although this has helped customers accelerate project development, an automated build, test, and deployment infrastructure is still critical for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) scenarios. Without the native integration with Azure DevOps, customers were still forced to manually write PowerShell and TSQL scripts integrated with Azure DevOps for an automated release process.
With SQL Server Data Tools generally available and native Azure DevOps support, you can now set up stable release pipelines without any custom code, and changes to your data warehouse model can be safely and automatically promoted across development, testing, and production environments. Preview customers such as T-Mobile will now be able to accelerate their feature development with Azure Synapse.
“In our current environment, we would have needed hundreds of custom scripts to validate and promote changes across our test and production environments. We’re excited to now simply use SSDT, MSBuild, and the Publish task in Azure DevOps to deploy and release features to production on a consistent and faster cadence.” – Anthony Sabol, Director, Reporting & Analytics at T-Mobile.
Integrate with Microsoft Azure Repos for continuous integration
Data engineers and developers can easily integrate their SQL Server Data Tools database projects with Microsoft Azure Repos.
Configure continuous deployment using Microsoft Azure Pipelines
Changes committed to source control in Azure Repos can automatically be pre-validated using MSBuild and promoted to target environments using Microsoft Azure Pipelines and the built-in SQL Analytics deployment task extension.
Cross platform support for Schema Compare with Azure Data Studio
Azure Data Studio is a cross-platform database tool that now allows you to compare the schema between two data warehouse definitions.
Next steps
- Install Visual Studio 2019 for SQL Analytics to get started
- Set up source control integration with SQL Analytics by using Azure Repos
- Integrate a simple Azure Pipeline for continuous integration and deployment for SQL analytics capabilities within Azure Synapse
- Learn more about Azure Data Studio SQL Compare
- For feature requests and providing us feedback, please vote on our UserVoice
