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
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Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Lake Analytics
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
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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 …
Well-suited Scenarios for Azure Data Factory (ADF): When an organization has data sources spread across on-premises databases and cloud storage solutions, I think Azure Data Factory is excellent for integrating these sources. Azure Data Factory's integration with Azure Databricks allows it to handle large-scale data transformations effectively, leveraging the power of distributed processing. For regular ETL or ELT processes that need to run at specific intervals (daily, weekly, etc.), I think Azure Data Factory's scheduling capabilities are very handy. Less Appropriate Scenarios for Azure Data Factory: Real-time Data Streaming - Azure Data Factory is primarily batch-oriented. Simple Data Copy Tasks - For straightforward data copy tasks without the need for transformation or complex workflows, in my opinion, using Azure Data Factory might be overkill; simpler tools or scripts could suffice. Advanced Data Science Workflows: While Azure Data Factory can handle data prep and transformation, in my experience, it's not designed for in-depth data science tasks. I think for advanced analytics, machine learning, or statistical modeling, integration with specialized tools would be necessary.
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.
It allows copying data from various types of data sources like on-premise files, Azure Database, Excel, JSON, Azure Synapse, API, etc. to the desired destination.
We can use linked service in multiple pipeline/data load.
It also allows the running of SSIS & SSMS packages which makes it an easy-to-use ETL & ELT tool.
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
The easy integration with other Microsoft software as well as high processing speed, very flexible cost, and high level of security of Microsoft Azure products and services stack up against other similar products.
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.
