Microsoft's Azure Data Lake Analytics is a BI service for processing big data jobs without consideration for infrastructure.
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Azure Synapse Analytics
Score 7.6 out of 10
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Azure Synapse Analytics is described as the former Azure SQL Data Warehouse, evolved, and as a limitless analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives users the freedom to query data using either serverless or provisioned resources, at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.
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's well suited for large, fastly growing, and frequently changing data warehouses (e.g., in startups). It's also suited for companies that want a single, relatively easy-to-use, centralized cloud service for all their data needs. Larger, more structured organizations could still benefit from this service by using Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools, knowing that costs will be much higher than other solutions. I think this product is not suited for smaller, simpler workloads (where an Azure SQL Database and a Data Factory could be enough) or very large scenarios, where it may be better to build custom infrastructure.
Quick to return data. Queries in a SQL data warehouse architecture tend to return data much more quickly than a OLTP setup. Especially with columnar indexes.
Ability to manage extremely large SQL tables. Our databases contain billions of records. This would be unwieldy without a proper SQL datawarehouse
Backup and replication. Because we're already using SQL, moving the data to a datawarehouse makes it easier to manage as our users are already familiar with SQL.
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.
With Azure, it's always the same issue, too many moving parts doing similar things with no specialisation. ADF, Fabric Data Factory and Synapse pipeline serve the same purpose. Same goes for Fabric Warehouse and Synapse SQL pools.
Could do better with serverless workloads considering the competition from databricks and its own fabric warehouse
Synapse pipelines is a replica of Azure Data Factory with no tight integration with Synapse and to a surprise, with missing features from ADF. Integration of warehouse can be improved with in environment ETl tools
The data warehouse portion is very much like old style on-prem SQL server, so most SQL skills one has mastered carry over easily. Azure Data Factory has an easy drag and drop system which allows quick building of pipelines with minimal coding. The Spark portion is the only really complex portion, but if there's an in-house python expert, then the Spark portion is also quiet useable.
Microsoft does its best to support Synapse. More and more articles are being added to the documentation, providing more useful information on best utilizing its features. The examples provided work well for basic knowledge, but more complex examples should be added to further assist in discovering the vast abilities that the system has.
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.
In comparing Azure Synapse to the Google BigQuery - the biggest highlight that I'd like to bring forward is Azure Synapse SQL leverages a scale-out architecture in order to distribute computational processing of data across multiple nodes whereas Google BigQuery only takes into account computation and storage.
Licensing fees is replaced with Azure subscription fee. No big saving there
More visibility into the Azure usage and cost
It can be used a hot storage and old data can be archived to data lake. Real time data integration is possible via external tables and Microsoft Power BI
