Particle allows businesses to bring their Internet of Things (IoT) products to market faster. It provides a secure, easy-to-use, full-stack IoT cloud platform and low-cost connected hardware.

Azure Synapse (formerly Azure SQL Data Warehouse) is a cloud-based petabyte-scale columnar database service with controls to manage compute and storage resources independently. It offers encryption of data at rest and dynamic data masking to mask sensitive data on the fly, and it integrates with Azure Active Directory. It can replicate to read-only databases in different geographic regions for load balancing and fault tolerance.

Particle exposes events through webhooks. To use webhooks, log into your Particle console and click on the Integrations tab, then click New Integration > Webhook. Set the event name to the item you want to track; it's good practice to specify the name of the field where you want the data to live in your data warehouse. Set the URL to the key or token that you'll use to accept the data. Leave the request type as POST. In the device field, select the device you want to trigger the webhook. Finally, click Create Webhook.

Particle sends data in JSON format via webhook through a POST request whenever an event triggers it to do so. The JSON fields and endpoints will match the data collected by your form. For instance:

{
    "event": [event-name],
    "data": [event-data],
    "published_at": [timestamp],
    "coreid": [device-id]
}

Azure Synapse provides a multi-step process for loading data. After extracting the data from its source, you can move it to Azure Blob storage or Azure Data Lake Store. You can then use one of three utilities to load the data:

• AZCopy uses the public internet.
• Azure ExpressRoute routes the data through a dedicated private connection to Azure, bypassing the public internet by using a VPN or point-to-point Ethernet network.
• The Azure Data Factory (ADF) cloud service has a gateway that you can install on your local server, then use to create a pipeline to move data to Azure Storage.

From Azure Storage you can load the data into Azure Synapse staging tables by using Microsoft's PolyBase technology. You can run any transformations you need while the data is in staging, then insert it into production tables. Microsoft offers documentation for the whole process.

Once you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and move it into your data warehouse, you're going to have to maintain it. If Particle modifies its API, or sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Azure Synapse is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Panoply, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Panoply, To S3, and To Delta Lake.