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mpolonskiy5637's avatar
mpolonskiy5637
Frequent Visitor
2 years ago

Lake Database vs SQL Database in Synapse

I am trying to understand synapse concepts:   When talking about SQL Serverless Pools Managed Tables are not possible, so we have Unamanged or External Tables and Views. It seems now that I can cr...
data engineering
data science
data warehouse
AndyDDC's avatar
AndyDDC
Most Valuable Professional
2 years ago

Hi mpolonskiy5637 the difference between Synapse Lake Databaes and Synapse Serverless is that lake databases are spark based, so you can fully manage your reads/writes to tables in lake databases using spark pools.  Serverless is t-sql based and is really just for casting structure over data in a data lake and you don't have much in the way of write capabilities.

 

Lake databases expose their metadata to Serverless as well. So you can create a lake database, create managed or unmanaged tables in the lake database using spark pools, then those tables will be made available for querying using serverless.

 

think of serverless as more of a read-only service using t-sql