How to crawl Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics

Once you have configured the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics permissions, you can establish a connection between Atlan and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.

To crawl metadata from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

Select the source

To select Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics as your source:

1. In the top right of any screen in Atlan, navigate to +New and click New Workflow.
2. From the Marketplace page, click Synapse Assets.
3. In the right panel, click Setup Workflow.

Provide your credentials

Choose your authentication method:

• In Basic authentication, you will need a username, password, and database name. 
• In Service principal authentication, you will need a client ID, client secret, tenant ID, and database name.

Basic authentication

To enter your Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics credentials:

1. For Host, enter the server name of your SQL pool.
2. For Port, enter the port number where your SQL pool is available.
3. For Username, enter the username you created when setting up user permissions.
4. For Password, enter the password you created when setting up user permissions.
5. For Database, enter the name of the database you want to crawl.
6. Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.
7. Once authentication is successful, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Service principal authentication

To enter your Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics credentials:

1. For Host, enter the server name of your SQL pool.
2. For Port, enter the port number where your SQL pool is available.
3. For Client ID, enter the application (client) ID you copied for your service principal.
4. For Client Secret, enter the client secret you copied for your service principal.
5. For Tenant ID, enter the directory (tenant) ID you copied for your service principal.
6. For Database, enter the name of the database you want to crawl.
7. Click the Test Authentication button to confirm connectivity to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.
8. Once authentication is successful, navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next.

Configure the connection

To complete the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics connection configuration:

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might use values like production,development,gold, or analytics.
2. (Optional) To change the users who are able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins.
   🚨 Careful! If you do not specify any user or group, no one will be able to manage the connection — not even admins.
3. Navigate to the bottom of the screen and click Next to proceed.

Configure the crawler

Before running the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics crawler, you can further configure it.

On the Metadata page, you can override the defaults for any of these options:

• To select the assets you want to exclude from crawling, click Exclude Metadata. (This will default to no assets if none are specified.)
• To select the assets you want to include in crawling, click Include Metadata. (This will default to all assets, if none are specified.)
• To have the crawler ignore tables and views based on a naming convention, specify a regular expression in the Exclude regex for tables & views field.
• For Advanced Config, keep Default for the default configuration or click Custom to configure the crawler:
  • For Use JDBC Internal Methods, click True to enable JDBC internal methods for data extraction or click False to disable it.

Run the crawler

To run the Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics crawler, after completing the steps above:

1. To check for any permissions or other configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.
2. You can either:
   • To run the crawler once immediately, at the bottom of the screen, click the Run button.
   • To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, at the bottom of the screen, click the Schedule Run button.

Once the crawler has completed running, you will see the assets on Atlan's asset page! 🎉