Configure workload importance in dedicated SQL pool for Azure Synapse Analytics

Setting importance in dedicated SQL pool for Azure Synapse allows you to influence the scheduling of queries. Queries with higher importance will be scheduled to run before queries with lower importance. To assign importance to queries, you need to create a workload classifier.

Create a Workload Classifier with Importance

Often in a data warehouse scenario you have users, on a busy system, who need to run their queries quickly. The user could be executives of the company who need to run reports or the user could be an analyst running an adhoc query. To assign importance, you create a workload classifier and importance is assigned to a query. The examples below use the create workload classifier syntax to create two classifiers. Membername can be a single user or a group. To find existing dedicated SQL pool users, run:

Select name from sys.sysusers

To create a workload classifier, for a user with higher importance run:

CREATE WORKLOAD CLASSIFIER ExecReportsClassifier
    WITH (WORKLOAD_GROUP = 'xlargerc'
         ,MEMBERNAME     = 'name' 
         ,IMPORTANCE     = above_normal);

To create a workload classifier for a user running adhoc queries with lower importance run:

CREATE WORKLOAD CLASSIFIER AdhocClassifier
    WITH (WORKLOAD_GROUP = 'xlargerc'
         ,MEMBERNAME     = 'name' 
         ,IMPORTANCE     = below_normal);

Next Steps

• For more information about workload management, see Workload Classification
• For more information on Importance, see Workload Importance