Item: Azure Synapse Analytics
Rating: 6
Author: Paras Jasal

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Synapse Analytics

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 and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Positive Impact: Lots of happy customers who did not want to go the full road of databricks and delta lake and wanted to maintain Data Warehouse consistency, something delta lake, at times still fails to deliver
Positive Impact: You don't need to be technically sound to understand the UI, a few drag and drops and you have a copy pipeline at your disposal. Empowers customers like no other
Negative Impact: With so many frequent introductions from Azure, which are nothing but differently named forks of the same thing. Case in point, Fabric Data Factory, Synapse pipelines and Azure Data Factory, leaves the customers confused and unsure of the direction ahead

Usability

Extremely usable. Among the big 3, Microsoft makes it's vision clear, Data Engineering for everyone. The UI is second to none, the ease of useability, unmatched. For anyone with even a basic technical knowledge, Synapse is not only easy to pick up and use analytically, but also empowers its users to create full fledged data pipelines with simple low code platforms

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Fabric, Amazon Redshift, Azure Databricks and Google BigQuery

Synapse, in comparison has its ups and downs against the competitors. However, where it excels, and builds it's markets is the cheaper costs (compared to Redshift), low code platforms and an in house solution that does not need you to leave the Synapse workspace for end to end ETL use cases. The workspace empowers you, in a low code platform, to go from 0 to 1 without ever having to leave a single tab.

Key Insights

Do you think Azure Synapse Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Azure Synapse Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did Azure Synapse Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Azure Synapse Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Synapse Analytics again?

Other Software Used

Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory

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.

Comments

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Synapse Analytics The go to solution for medium scaled warehousing