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)
Teradata Vantage
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Teradata Vantage is presented as a modern analytics cloud platform that unifies everything—data lakes, data warehouses, analytics, and new data sources and types. Supports hybrid multi-cloud environments and priced for flexibility, Vantage delivers unlimited intelligence to build the future of business.
Users can deploy Vantage on public clouds (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP), hybrid multi-cloud environments, on-premises with Teradata IntelliFlex, or on commodity hardware with VMware.
Microsoft provides some great solutions but often times they are only providing the foundation for other vendors and partners to build off of, requiring you to work with their partners to fill out the capabilities or get to the level of performance you need. From a TCO …
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.
Teradata Vantage is well suited for large scale ETL pipelines like the ones we developed for anti money laundering risk matrices. It handles heavy joins, aggregations, and transformations on transactional data efficiently. We generate alert variables, adjust for inflation, and monitor establishments monthly with it, all integrated with Python and Control-M for a centralised automation across the company. For less appropriate, I would say that heavy resource demands might slow down experimentation for iterative work.
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
Teradata is an excellent option but only for a massive amount of data warehousing or analysis. If your data is not that big then it could be a misfit for your company and cost you a lot. The cost associated is quite extensive as compared to some other alternative RDBMS systems available in the market.
Migration of data from Teradata to some other RDBMS systems is quite painful as the transition is not that smooth and you need to follow many steps and even if one of them fails. You need to start from the beginning almost.
Last but not least the UI is pretty outdated and needs a revamp. Though it is simple, it needs to be presented in a much better way and more advanced options need to bee presented on the front page itself.
Teradata is a mature RDBMS system that expands its functionality towards the current cloud capabilities like object storage and flexible compute scale.
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.
Teradata Vantage allows us to create a scalable infrastructure to support our strategic initiatives. The dedicated compute power ensures reliable performance with isolated workloads and dedicated resources, optimizing workflows for faster, more efficient data transfers. The compute clusters support ETL processes and OSF’s developers and data science team with the flexibility to create self-service analytics, to spin up/down at any time, driving better performance and minimizing costs.
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 have meetings at the beginning with the technical team to explain our requirements to them and they were really putting in a lot of effort to come up with a solution which will address all our needs. They implemented the software and also trained a few of our resources on the same too. We can get in touch with them now as well whenever we run into a roadblock but it's very less now.
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.
Teradata is way ahead of its competitor because of its unique features of ensuring data privacy and data never gets corrupted even in worst case scenario. In most cases, the data corruption is a major issue if left unused and it leads to important data being wiped off which in ideal case should be stored for 3 years
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
Moving to Teradata in the Cloud-enabled a level of agility that previously didn't exist in the organization. It also enabled a level of analytic competency that was not achievable using other options on the aggressive timeline that was required. We didn't want to settle for reinventing a wheel when we had a super tuned performance capable beast readily available in Teradata. Teradata lets us focus on our business rather than spending money and effort trying to design software or database foundations features on an open source or lower performance platform.
