Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert AZ-305 Practice Question

Azure Synapse Analytics provides an integrated workspace that includes both Apache Spark pools for data engineering workloads and a serverless SQL pool that lets analysts query data in Azure Data Lake Storage by using standard T-SQL. Because the compute clusters are fully managed and can start on demand, there is little operational overhead.

Azure HDInsight can host Spark, but it requires you to provision and manage clusters and does not provide a built-in T-SQL endpoint for lake queries. Azure SQL Managed Instance is optimized for relational workloads; although external tables can access files in storage, it lacks Spark and is not ideal for petabyte-scale lake analytics. Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time event-processing engine and neither hosts Spark nor supports interactive T-SQL querying of historical data. Therefore, Azure Synapse Analytics best satisfies all the stated requirements.