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 5,000 Synapse Commit Units (SCUs)
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is optimized for analytic workloads, including data marts, data warehouses, data lakes, and data lakehouses. With Autonomous Data Warehouse, data scientists, business analysts, and nonexperts can discover business insights using data of any size and type. The solution is built for the cloud and optimized using Oracle Exadata.
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.
II would recommend Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to someone looking to fully automate the transferring of data especially in a warehouse scenario though I can see the elasticity of the suite that is offered and can see it is applicable in other scenarios not just warehouses.
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
Very easy and fast to load data into the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Exceptionally fast retrieval of data joining 100 million row table with a billion row table plus the size of the database was reduced by a factor of 10 due to how Oracle store[s] and organise[s] data and indexes.
Flexibility with scaling up and down CPU on the fly when needed, and just stop it when not needed so you don't get charged when it is not running.
It is always patched and always available and you can add storage dynamically as you need it.
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
Level of integration or compatibility to connect it to different applications can be improved
The support service is slow
The issue is with the record number limitation of not being able to bring back more than one million records or not being able to export larger datasets to Excel
Does not require continous attention from the DBA, autonomous features allows the database to perform most of the regular admin tasks without need for human intervention.
Allows to integrate multiple data sources on a central data warehouse, and explode the information stored with different analytic and reporting 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.
Understanding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is really simple, and Autonomous databases are even more. Using shared or dedicated infrastructure is one of the few things you need to consider at the moment of starting provisioning your Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse.
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.
Our organization adopted Oracle almost 20 years ago and there were a few options at that time. Oracle was the leading database tech company at that time and it was a safe choice to us. And they have been evolved and always ahead of new technologies, high performance, and professional business support. We didn't find a good reason to replace Oracle with any other competitors.
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.
Overall the business objective of all of our clients have been met positively with Oracle Data Warehouse. All of the required analysis the users were able to successfully carry out using the warehouse data.
Using a 3-tier architecture with the Oracle Data Warehouse at the back end the mid-tier has been integrated well. This is big plus in providing the necessary tools for end users of the data warehouse to carry out their analysis.
All of the various BI products (OBIEE, Cognos, etc.) are able to use and exploit the various analytic built-in functionalities of the Oracle Data Warehouse.
