Azure Data Lake Analytics vs. Azure Databricks

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.

Incentivized

Suppose you have multiple data sources and you want to bring the data into one place, transform it and make it into a data model. Azure Databricks is a perfectly suited solution for this. Leverage spark JDBC or any external cloud based tool (ADG, AWS Glue) to bring the data into a cloud storage. From there, Azure Databricks can handle everything. The data can be ingested by Azure Databricks into a 3 Layer architecture based on the delta lake tables. The first layer, raw layer, has the raw as is data from source. The enrich layer, acts as the cleaning and filtering layer to clean the data at an individual table level. The gold layer, is the final layer responsible for a data model. This acts as the serving layer for BI For BI needs, if you need simple dashboards, you can leverage Azure Databricks BI to create them with a simple click! For complex dashboards, just like any sql db, you can hook it with a simple JDBC string to any external BI tool.

Incentivized

• Process large data transformation jobs using pretty much any language needed.
• Native integration with Azure storage.
• Top notch security that fulfills all audit needs.
• Easy to consolidate enterprise data under one location - Single source of truth.

Incentivized

• SQL
• Data management
• Data access

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Their pipeline workflow orchestration is pretty primitive. Lacks some common features
• Workspace UI and navigation requires steep learning curve
• Personally, I am not fond of their autosave feature. Its dangerous for production level notebooks scripts

Incentivized

Based on my extensive use of Azure Databricks for the past 3.5 years, it has evolved into a beautiful amalgamation of all the data domains and needs. From a data analyst, to a data engineer, to a data scientist, it jas got them all! Being language agnostic and focused on easy to use UI based control, it is a dream to use for every Data related personnel across all experience levels!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Against all the tools I have used, Azure Databricks is by far the most superior of them all! Why, you ask? The UI is modern, the features are never ending and they keep adding new features. And to quote Apple, "It just works!" Far ahead of the competition, the delta lakehouse platform also fares better than it counterparts of Iceberg implementation or a loosely bound Delta Lake implementation of Synapse

Incentivized

• It lets us manage and scan data, making our work easy and efficient.
• It helped me manage real-time data, process it, and send it to reporting.
• Data centralization or data warehousing projects are being implemented with its help.

Incentivized

• Helped reduce time for collecting data
• Reduced cost in maintaining multiple data sources
• Access for multiple users and management of users/data in a single platform

Incentivized