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)
SAP Business Data Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SAP Business Data Cloud is a fully managed SaaS solution that unifies and governs all SAP data and seamlessly connects with third-party data—giving line-of-business leaders context to make even more impactful decisions.
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.
1. Data extraction from Non-SAP environment 2.Seamless integration with SAP Analytics Cloud for reporting purposes, avoiding the need to create complex reporting dashboards 3. Dataproducts across different modules are available for use in the SAP environment 4 . Snowflakes and Databricks offer more flexibility to address complex use cases, including even application of AI.
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.
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
In the new analytics world, BDC has been a game changer for SAP Analytics. Extending the SAP data for the usage in Databricks, snow flake, GCP has opened new doors for Analytics . Shift from traditional data warehousing to Business Data fabric adapting to the change in the analytics world is the need of the hour and Sap has managed to pulled it off with BDC
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.
It has business friendly options, governance features and as expected, integration with SAP products. However it feels complex for somebody who is non SAP background and for building lighter reports. There is lot of scope for improvement as compared to in general options available in the market. Otherwise it is best for business cases
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.
support team is generally responsive and knowledgeable, and most issues are addressed within acceptable timelines. Documentation and standard guidance are helpful for common scenarios.
I have done implementation of models in traditional bw and Using BDC. The integration of BDC with S4 hana for creating sap data products is seamless and reduces lot of implementation effort. The intelligent app feature is BDC also eases the implementation effort. If i have to compare the previous world with new BDC, implementation effort is largely saved
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.
BDC is a significant development over Datasphere in the sense that it unifies not only the transaction and olap systems but also other olap systems which may have existed in the landscape. Pce migration and availability of data from and 7.5 or B4 HANA system as a data product is also an exemplary feature.
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
