Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a highly scalable and cost-effective data lake solution for big data analytics. It combines the power of a high-performance file system with massive scale and economy to help you speed your time to insight. Data Lake Storage Gen2 extends Azure Blob Storage capabilities and is optimized for analytics workloads.
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Azure Synapse Analytics
Score 6.9 out of 10
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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.
Azure Data Lake storage is well suited for applications/use cases within organizations where capturing and storing large amounts of data in any format is required, primarily for storing and processing purposes. It's an easy and cost-effective cloud solution for your application data. The ability to integrate with other Azure Services like Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory is superb.
In terms of a well-suited scenario - the Azure Synapse can be used to capture data from multiple sources (especially from onPrem sources apart from Dataverse) and update the transformed data based on the given conditions (eg: refresh data based on the specified date/time ranges). Also, the transformed data can simply be transferred to Azure Data Lake for further processing by utilizing other analytics tools such as PowerBI.
Azure Data Lake Storage is extremely scalable. It allows us to scale up or down endlessly based on what we need including replication.
In terms of security, Azure Data Lake Storage fits our requirements really well as we can monitor and encrypt seamlessly. We can also assign permissions through roles and grant network-level access.
Due to the fact that it can scale, we are able to monitor the cost of storage and any given time and make financial decisions about our infrastructure based on how small or big we want to scale.
Keeping things "complicated, but simple"; [heterogeneous] data formats seen as just SQL tables to business experts used to use Power BI, Excel, and any other traditional SQL-oriented BI tools
Integration options using "Synapse pipelines", the application of ADFs
The greatly integrated solution of independent things (Spark MPP cluster, MPP SQL Servers, ADFs) - all sitting under one roof. Great job!
Integration with super-fast, globally replicated data. I really appreciate the integration of NoSQL databases (namely Core API and Mongo API under Cosmos DB) with purely batch-processed BI data
I'd like to see a better cross-platform native client. Azure Data Explorer is fine, but it's far from the "SSMS" kind of experience SQL Server users are used to.
Listing a large number of file is somewhat problematic and slow. Using the native C# library, running directly on an Azure VM, it can take several hours to list just a couple million files.
Switching from V1 to V2 requires the creation of a new Storage Account and that's pretty inconvenient.
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
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.
The Azure Data Lake solution is designed for organizations that want to take advantage of big data. It provides a data platform that can help developers, data scientists, and analysts store data of any size and format and perform all types of processing and analytics across multiple platforms and programming languages. It can work with your existing solutions, such as identity management and security solutions. It also integrates with other data warehouses and cloud environments. It can be useful for organizations that need the above softwares.
They're all part of the Microsoft Azure family, so they are not exactly competitors. They overlap in functionality, but they're targeted at different levels of customers. Azure Data Factory is an excellent stand-alone PaaS (included in Synapse Analytics) for writing, scheduling, and monitoring pipelines. Azure SQL Database (and all the Azure SQL family) is excellent for traditional, SQL-based data warehouses, especially if you're migrating from on-premises. Combined with Azure Data Factory (that can run SSIS packages), it's a perfect solution for a simple path to the cloud. Azure Databricks is effectively the only internal "competitor" to Synapse Analytics but targeted more to a "platform-agnostic" audience. On the other hand, Synapse is more of a proprietary mix of products that are more tightly related to Microsoft technologies.
The cost can be high for more advanced work. In some cases, for instance, time limits and lab runtimes may be too short if you are too slow to learn what is explained as you go along.
promote flexible team communication. You can create different spaces for different teams, and share files and tasks.
It definitely has a positive impact on ROI. We are able to use it to generate MORE revenue through predictive analytics and pricing optimization.
Because of the SQL Data Warehouse design, we're able to set up some self service reporting tools which allow our users to generate reports ad hoc instead of having a full time employee creating these by hand.
Having visibility into the data is very useful for management to make good business decisions.
