Synapse Pools

Dedicated SQL Pool

Designed for Kimball style star/snowflake schema data warehouses.

Billed for storage and compute. Can be paused.

Contains tables (internal, external, temp), views, procedures - it is a database.

Internal tables are columnstore.

Does not support OPENROWSET, external tables must be explicity created.

Query language is TSQL.


Serverless SQL Pool

Designed for data processing, not data storage.

Billed per-use for compute only. Has cost budgets and limits.

Does not contain internal tables, just external and temporary.

Query language is TSQL.


Links

https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/synapse-serverless-and-dedicated-pool-the-differences-no-one-told-you-about/#:~:text=The%20basic%20differences%20between%20Synapse,we%20choose%20and%20a%20constant