Synapse Analytics The go to solution for medium scaled warehousing
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We usually deal with large scale data migrations. Synapse, at times, fits in perfectly with a fabric lakehouse-warehouse solution or a standard data warehousing solution bringing and collating data from multiple data sources into a data arehouse in the form of Synapse. While there are multiple trends in the data space involving lakehouses and delta lake and what not, Synapse still holds its place best when warehouses are talked about. With flexibility of external tables and serverless workloads for faster data reads, to the scalability of database tables with transactional and analytical use cases, Synapse can serve a wide array of use cases and rightfully so.
Pros
- Data Warehousing
- Data Engineering
- Data Marts
- Data Analytics
Cons
- 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
Likelihood to Recommend
Usually, there is a huge overlap between use cases that suit Synapse also suiting databricks, Fabric Warehouse etc. However, the best suited use cases for Synapse or those involving mostly ELT and data warehousing. For example, If you have data lying around in isolated databases, data that is clean but perhaps not curated, would serve as a perfect use case for Synapse to jump in and have the best suited solution. You could use a plethora of Synapse Pipelines' connectors to simply extract the data from these isolated Databases, load it into staging tables, apply basic refinement to push it into dbo tables and perform analytics on top of this. With intuitive UI and powerful dynamic expression, it's an accelerated metadata driven framework knocking at your door waiting to happen with just a few drag and drops and some metadata table magic.