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.
$4,700
per month 5000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
IBM BigInsights is an analytics and data visualization tool leveraging hadoop.
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.
Well suited for my big data related project or a static data set analysis especially for uploading huge dataset to the cluster.
But had some issues with connecting IoT real-time data and feeding to Power BI. It might be my understanding please take it as a mere comment rather than a suggestion.
It takes some time to setup a proper SQL Datawarehouse architecture. Without proper SSIS/automation scripts, this can be a very daunting task.
It takes a lot of foresight when designing a Data Warehouse. If not properly designed, it can be very troublesome to use and/or modify later on.
It takes a lot of effort to maintain. Businesses are continually changing. With that, a full time staff member or more will be required to maintain the SQL Data Warehouse.
Easier pricing and plug-and-play like you see with AWS and Azure, it would be nice from a budgeting and billing standpoint, as well as better support for the administration.
Bundling of the Cloud Object Storage should be included with the Analytics Engine.
The inability to add your own Hadoop stack components has made some transfers a little more complex.
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.
When client is already having or using Azure then it’s wise to go with Synapse rather than using Snowflake. We got a lot of help from Microsoft consultants and Microsoft partners while implementing our EDW via Synapse and support is easily available via Microsoft resources and blogs. I don’t see that with Snowflake
We initially wanted to go with Google BigQuery, mainly for the name recognition. However, the pricing and support structure led us to seek alternatives, which pointed us to IBM. Apache Spark was also in the running, but here IBM's domination in the industry made the choice a no-brainer. As previously stated, the support received was not quite what we expected, but was adequate.
This product has allowed us to gather analytics data across multiple platforms so we can view and analyze the data from different workflows, all in one place.
IBM Analytics has allowed us to scale on demand which allows us to capture more and more data, thus increasing our ROI.
The convenience of the ability to access and administer the product via multiple interfaces has allowed our administrators to ensure that the application is making a positive ROI for our business users and partners.
