I was doing a project helping an environmental organization find ways to better store and utilize their geospatial data(mostly .shp files and point clouds).

As a solution we recommended moving their data from Dropbox to Azure (Blob Storage) for more flexible storage management and options to analyze data.

To give a proof-of-concept about the benefits of using cloud storage, I made a geospatial analytics prototype using Azure Synapse Analytics.

1. Creating Synapse Analytics Workspace

To use Synapse Analytics, we have to create a workspace to use our data. Create new account/file system name

After we create workspace, we’ll have it on the workspace menu on Azure Synapse Analytics

Create an apache spark pool

Go back to the workspace and click Open Synapse Studio

Go to develop -> + -> new notebook

Rename notebook and assign the spark pool we created earlier

• Now we can use spark resources to do spark tasks in Azure Synapse Analytics.
• Unlike other spark environments, you don’t have to start a spark session at the beginning of the notebook, because the notebook automatically starts session in variable ‘spark’ when the notebook starts.