Microsoft's Azure Data Factory is a service built for all data integration needs and skill levels. It is designed to allow the user to easily construct ETL and ELT processes code-free within the intuitive visual environment, or write one's own code. Visually integrate data sources using more than 80 natively built and maintenance-free connectors at no added cost. Focus on data—the serverless integration service does the rest.
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Azure Data Lake Analytics
Score 5.7 out of 10
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Microsoft's Azure Data Lake Analytics is a BI service for processing big data jobs without consideration for infrastructure.
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Pricing
Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Lake Analytics
Editions & Modules
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Pricing Offerings
Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Lake Analytics
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
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Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Community Pulse
Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Lake Analytics
Considered Both Products
Azure Data Factory
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Azure Data Lake Analytics
Verified User
Program Manager
Chose Azure Data Lake Analytics
ADL Analytics supports big data such as Hadoop, HDInsight, Data lakes. Usually, a traditional data warehouse stores data from various data sources, transform data into a single format and analyze for decision making. Developers use complex queries that might take longer hours …
Best scenario is for ETL process. The flexibility and connectivity is outstanding. For our environment, SAP data connectivity with Azure Data Factory offers very limited features compared to SAP Data Sphere. Due to the limited modelling capacity of the tool, we use Databricks for data modelling and cleaning. Usage of multiple tools could have been avoided if adf has modelling capabilities.
Azure Data Lake Analytics services are beneficial when working with a lot of data. It can process enormous amounts of data extremely quickly. Service is secure and easy to set up, build, scale, and run on Azure. Regarding big data analytics and reporting, parallel processing has a significant impact. It consolidated our analytics from multiple systems and increased our analysis productivity. This tool has excellent support for reporting tools like Power BI and is very quick when performing analytics.
Granularity of Errors: Sometimes, Azure Data Factory provides error messages that are too generic or vague for us, making it challenging to pinpoint the exact cause of a pipeline failure. Enhanced error messages with more actionable details would greatly assist us as users in debugging their pipelines.
Pipeline Design UI: In my experience, the visual interface for designing pipelines, especially when dealing with complex workflows or numerous activities, can become cluttered. I think a more intuitive and scalable design interface would improve usability. In my opinion, features like zoom, better alignment tools, or grouping capabilities could make managing intricate designs more manageable.
Native Support: While Azure Data Factory does support incremental data loads, in my experience, the setup can be somewhat manual and complex. I think native and more straightforward support for Change Data Capture, especially from popular databases, would simplify the process of capturing and processing only the changed data, making regular data updates more efficient
There's a bit of bias towards cloud with ADL Analytics. Depending upon a company's infra strategy and investment plans, there are some challenges with migration and integeration.
Not worth the time/effort/money if the organization doesn't have "Volume" of data. Cost effective only when daily loads exceed around 1million.
While training materials are available online, Adoption rate - Yet to pick up.
So far product has performed as expected. We were noticing some performance issues, but they were largely Synapse related. This has led to a shift from Synapse to Databricks. Overall this has delayed our analytic platform. Once databricks becomes fully operational, Azure Data Factory will be critical to our environment and future success.
We have not had need to engage with Microsoft much on Azure Data Factory, but they have been responsive and helpful when needed. This being said, we have not had a major emergency or outage requiring their intervention. The score of seven is a representation that they have done well for now, but have not proved out their support for a significant issue
Azure Data Factory helps us automate to schedule jobs as per customer demands to make ETL triggers when the need arises. Anyone can define the workflow with the Azure Data Factory UI designer tool and easily test the systems. It helped us automate the same workflow with programming languages like Python or automation tools like ansible. Numerous options for connectivity be it a database or storage account helps us move data transfer to the cloud or on-premise systems.
We did some research about Alibaba Cloud Data Lake Analytics and even being cheaper than Azure Data Lake Analytics, we decided to go for the second one once we noticed they have more features and better documentation. Another thing we considered during this process was the fact that we have more people that already have Azure Cloud knowledge.
