Azure SQL Data Warehouse - Max concurrent queries

Question

I have to decide to use an Azure SQL Data Warehouse or a SQL Data warehouse based on Microsoft SQL Server virtualized on a VM.

The problem what i do not understand is the MAX CONCURRENT QUERIES LIMITATION TO 32. The same for the Azure SQL Database is 6400.

To be honest when i want to use the Azure Data Warehouse in an Enterprise environment the 32 concurrent queries are laughable or i do not understand it.

Lets assume a company with 10.000 Employees worldwide and i set up a Azure Data Warehouse for reporting purpose where lets assume 250 permanently are querying from or additional 250 employees are working with a business app which uses data from the Data Warehouse. How should this work without extreme performance lacks?

Answer 1

This isn't the issue that you might think.

First, the limit is now 128. (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-data-warehouse/memory-and-concurrency-limits#gen2-1)

Second, this is well above the concurrency of the next most concurrent single cluster warehouse. I've often wondered what marketing mistake was made by Microsoft that concurrency is seen as a limitation on ASDW, but rarely mentioned for less concurrent competitors.

Third, the best way to serve thousands of concurrent query users (ie, dashboards) is through PowerBI hybrid queries, and (potentially) Azure Analysis Services. This gives extremely high concurrency and interactivity.

Perhaps the best evidence I can give is that I work with Azure SQL Data Warehouse customers on a daily basis. I often get questions like this when a customer is first exposed to ASDW, but I never get questions about concurrency by the time they're in production. In other words, the issue of "concurrency" just isn't important for most customers.