Generally available: Increasing Azure Synapse Analytics Spark performance up to 77%

We are always working to improve Azure Analytics Spark performance. We are making significant changes that will increase Spark performance by up to 77%. 

Based on our testing using the 1TB TPC-H industry benchmark, you’re likely to see up to 77% increased performance. While your workload may perform differently than the TPC-H benchmark, everyone is expected to see improved performance. These Spark performance improvements comes from moving to the latest Azure v5 VMs, which have improved CPU performance, increased temporary SSD throughput and lastly, higher remote storage IOPS. 

We have over 40 regions world-wide and will be implementing this change region by region. Canada Central will be the first region we implement. We expect these changes to take many months to roll out world-wide. We will publish each region that we update, and customers will automatically receive the performance increase in each region at no cost. We expect Canada Central to be the first region.

There are no actions that are required. After each region is upgraded, your jobs will be completed in less time. You could choose to reduce the node size or the number of nodes if cost savings are more important to you than job completion elapsed time.

Learn more about optimising Spark performance, Apache Spark pool configurations.