Ways you can browse industry templates and add tables to create your own lake database

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

With Azure Synapse Database Templates generally available, our customers are constantly wanting to see and learn more about how to use these templates. Through these blogs we want to share tips and tricks our customers can use to help them utilize these templates in an efficient way. We’ve recently received several questions around the different ways a user can navigate these templates to create their lake databases. In this blog, I’d like to walk through a few options that may come handy as you give database templates a try.

 

Azure Synapse Analytics offers a no-code database designer which allows you to browse these database templates, select and customize the tables you want to use, to model your enterprise data. There are several ways to browse the tables provided by the comprehensive industry templates within the designer’s exploration experience. Though the user experience is super intuitive, there are a few tips and tricks that can make this process even easier. Let’s do a quick tour to learn about the different ways to browse these templates.

  1. Search for specific table names: This is the most basic option where a user can search using the table name as a keyword to bring back relevant results and select the appropriate table to add to the designer canvas.

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  1. Using relationship toggle: This option comes handy when you have already selected the specific tables of interest and now want to bring in other tables that are related to a given table onto the canvas. One can easily click into the ‘Relationships’ tab of a table and toggle the ‘Show all’ button to view all the relationships to and from that table in a list view and select the appropriate relationships to add the corresponding table to the canvas.

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  1. Browse by business area and select the appropriate tables by checking the boxes: Users can expand a business area such as ‘Channel’ or ‘Business Metrics’ to view all the tables listed under that business area and select specific tables of interest to add to the canvas.

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  1. Select all tables within a business area: In this option, users can select & add all tables shown under a business area to the canvas by clicking on the ellipsis next to the business area name and clicking on the ‘Show all’ option. If you ‘Unselect all’ then all the tables are removed from the canvas.

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  1. Selecting an enterprise template: Clicking on the ‘Filter tables’ button lists the Enterprise templates available. Enterprise templates contain a subset of tables that describe the connectivity between the related business areas and are most likely to be of interest to an organization within a specific industry. They are a great starting point and serve as an accelerator for many types of large projects. To see all the tables related to a business area refer to 6) below.

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  1. Selecting a business area template: Clicking on the ‘Filter tables’ button lists the Business Area templates available. Business Area templates describe a particular business or subject area with the greatest level of detail and lowest level of data granularity. They expand upon the subset of business area data represented in the industry enterprise database providing complete coverage for that business area. The tables in the Business Area template are a superset of the tables in the Business Area folder as they also contain related tables from other business areas to provide a complete the picture of the subject area.

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  1. Add all related tables to a table on canvas: Another easy way to bring in all related tables to a table of interest is to click on ellipsis on the right corner of a table and click ‘Add related tables’ to bring in all the tables that have a relationship to & from that table. A word of caution with this option is that in some cases this action might add over 100 tables to your canvas making it difficult to navigate. You can always use the appropriate zoom to traverse the tables.  

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Did you know?

In each of these scenarios, if you wish to undo one recent action you took, you can click on the ‘undo last action’ iconlakshmimurthy_0-1654896182557.png. This is particularly useful when you ‘Add related tables’ and find that you don’t intend to keep all those tables on the canvas.

 

To clear out your canvas and start over, you can click on the ellipsis icon lakshmimurthy_1-1654896214511.pngto start afresh.

 

For more information about database templates or to get started, please visit aka.ms/SynapseDBTemplates.

 

 

 

 

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