Harnessing the ability to ingest, explore, prepare, transform, and serve data, historically meant that customers needed to provision, configure and maintain multiple services, suited for the different stages of the data lifecycle. Within the Microsoft ecosystem and prior to the availability of Azure Synapse Analytics, the usual suspects that would help facilitate such a set of capabilities would include services such as Azure Data Factory for data integration, Azure Databricks for big data, and dedicated SQL pools (formerly SQL DW) for data warehousing. With Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft has unified these capabilities under a single analytics service.