Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Reviews

We are mainly using this solution as an interface between the Data Lake and the users.

We are consultants and this product assists with the services that we offer for our clients. Our company has a large number of consultants who are working in this space.

The most important feature for me is the integration with PolyBase.

Other valuable features for me are advanced threat protection and data privacy.

I would like there to be more focus on the Software as a Service (SaaS) product. For example, Snowflake, one of their competitors, is more focused on SaaS.

They need to improve a little bit in terms of user-friendliness. I would rate them a three out of five, in terms of how user-friendly the interface is.

The auto-scaling capabilities are quite poor, especially compared to Snowflake or Firebolt.

In total, I have been using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics for one year.

This is a stable solution.

You can scale it, although you need to put in more effort. We have approximately 800 users.

In general, Microsoft support is pretty good.

I have experience with similar products such as Snowflake and Firebolt.

The initial setup is very complex compared to other products. It takes weeks to deploy.

We implement this product for our clients.

The cost of the licensing depends on the size of the warehouse, where the cost of storage is approximately $130 USD per terabyte. The charge might be several thousand dollars or more each month.

There are multiple options that are available at an extra cost. For example, the advanced threat protection costs an extra $25 USD.

We evaluated several options before choosing Synaps Analytics.

The suitability of this product really depends on the use case. It is good if your company is using only Microsoft products and you don't want to use another stack. If you want to use other platforms then you should consider Snowflake, which is also deployed on Azure. It really depends on what it is that you need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our general use case is for government purposes, and therefore, I really can't get into too much detail about it.

The solution is great at saving time. Overall, we spend far less time putting together static reports than we used to.

We're able to generate some dynamic reports. I find that very valuable to be able to see our data in such unique ways.

The pricing is pretty good.

The product is very user friendly.

After only using the solution for three months, we haven't yet really gotten into every corner of its capabilities. It's hard to say what might be missing in terms of features.

It would be ideal if the solution could be better used intuitively by the staff without having a great deal of training. An organization should be able to adopt and operationalize it throughout their company with minimal training.

I've been using the solution for three months at this point. It hasn't been too long.

The solution is quite reliable. We haven't experienced any problems with crashing or freezing and haven't really had experience with bugs or glitches. It's stable.

The solution is scalable. A company shouldn't have issues expanding it out.

In our organizations, we have less than a dozen users, and those are mostly IT and IT management people.

Technical support is okay. I'd rate them seven out of ten. We're satisfied with the level of support we are given.

We were searching for a solution. When we found it, we found something we could use, and then we just stuck with that. We didn't have a previous solution. We had nothing before.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward. I'm not that technical, and I was able to handle it.

We've found the pricing to be fair. It's not too expensive.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations. If they have time, I would suggest a company spends more effort looking at some different offerings. That said, generally, if you don't have a whole lot of money to do something, it's a decent option.

We haven't used the solution for too long, however, it's offered us everything we need in terms of features and capabilities. On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight.

Our primary use case is for gathering data and analytics. We provide insights into vehicle data. We gather millions of records per second and we have various millions of vehicles running across. 

I have been using Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse for three years. 

It could be more stable. 

It is a Cloud platform and so it is easy to scale.

When it comes to first level support, most of the time it's not a technical issue, it's a configuration issue where data mismatches. I get support anytime I want. Within an hour I can get anybody on the call and get the issue resolved. They have a one-to-one support channel which we can email when we require assistance.

We installed Datawarehouse in a couple of minutes. However, the configuration based on our data models took time. It can take us weeks because that's where our optimization sits. Just tuning the parameters can take several days' at a time. 

The price of the package is not expensive and depends on how much it is used.

I would rate Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse a nine out of ten. 

I used it for a project thesis for my school project.

I like its performance. It is well-structured and offers a lot of practical options. Because of the visual design of the product, it is very easy to find icons and other visual elements.

It took me more than two weeks to understand how it works. I had an intensive training session to understand it, which was enough. It was not hard to understand how it works.

I am a researcher. For people to be able to research a solution, there should be at least a free trial. Just advertising a product or saying that this product is better doesn't work. I would strongly recommend providing a lot of free trials and trainings. This will also help Microsoft in having more users or customers. Oracle provides some free trials. You can just go for a free trial and use your database online, which is very good.

I have been using Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse for three months.

It was ready when I started to use it. I just had to do my project.

Its price could be better. It was a school project, and I got it for free. If I try to pay through my company, it is a little bit more expensive as compared to Oracle.

I am also using an Oracle solution. Oracle has been in the database field for a longer time, and it provides you more familiar terms that the users understand. When users start to work with an Oracle solution, they are more familiar with the terms. They just need basic training to understand it, but with Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, they have to be a little bit more experienced. In order to understand this product better, they have to know how other Microsoft products work.

It is a powerful asset if we can use it and learn more about it. If Microsoft can give some free training sessions for students and amateurs, it would be helpful in knowing more about this product from inside. 

I would rate Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse an eight out of ten.

We are service providers for our clients.

My clients primarily come from the enterprise segments, such as manufacturing, retail, pharmaceutical, and industrial. Most are supported by a large ERP solution like SAP.

Some of our clients are mid-size and others are large enterprise companies, some of the largest in India.

Some of the most valuable features would include Familiarity for practitioners like us and also familiarity for the businesses. SQL servers have been around for several decades and there are many who are familiar with SQL servers, such as SSIS and SSRS.

They are available on the Cloud, and the platform is very intuitive.

It integrates very well with Power BI, which I would rate as the best self-service BI. All the data warehouses eventually end up in BI or Machine Learning. 

Instant Apps that are more integrated rather than desperate components. You need to get different components engineered together, and with SQL everything comes together.

Instant Apps is a combination of your Spark compute platform, your SQL data platform, and your object storage. It's a platform that is integrated all together. 

It's easy to work with a faster turnaround time on my project deliveries.

Also, the integration with Power BI self-service is much, much easier and familiar.

You can have several SQL servers, they have large .NET artifacts that combine various components together very well.

What I would like to see more and more of in Azure is its support for IoT and streaming media information.

It needs strong support for social media, internet data, and native support for NoSQL. At this time, it works very well with the structured data

Stability could be improved.

Technical support is very good, but could also be improved.

My company has been working with SQL Data Warehouse for approximately three and a half years, and I have been working with this solution for one and a half years.

In the last six months, there have been a couple of incidents. We have experienced som outages. One of our clients was in a blackout for a couple of hours. Most of the clients in India have experienced outages also. They were restored, so I refer to them as glitches.

In principle, it's a limitless, serverless solution. As long as your region has resources, you can go on expanding. We have not had any problems with scalability.

Microsoft Azure comes integrated with Databricks as a Machine Learning platform, it's highly scalable.

Technicals support engages very well. We have account managers in place who correspond with technical support. 

The technical support team has a good relationship with our Account managers.

If we have an issue, we advise our account managers and present the ticket, they contact Technical support and resolve the issue very quickly.

If however, I have to contact Microsoft technical support at the backend, they are not very knowledgable. They have a good understanding of their products, but most of the time they struggle with that.

The initial setup is easy. The learning curve for Microsoft platforms is very low. An engineer with very little experience would be able to complete the initial set up with ease.

It has a quick turnaround time. We have completed the deployment in weeks.

For a BI project scheduled for six months, within the first month we would have completed the data warehouse installation, and the remaining five months would be for building the content, the data pipelines from the sources, the semantic models, and the BI.

When you compare it with other solutions that take months to get your sandbox running or to get your development running.

They are cost aggressive, and it integrates well with other Microsoft tools. For example Downstream and Teams.

We use the serverless platform as a service, that is only available with Microsoft Azure.

You don't have to hire experienced engineers to set up and implement the solution, saving you money, because it is very intuitive and the turnaround time is very low compared to other data warehouses. I would put it in par with solutions such as Redshift and BigQuery.

It's very modern, easy, and intuitive.

Most of the services are cheaper than other vendors.

This definitely falls into one of the top three or top four solutions and platforms in the world. I would definitely recommend it. If someone should ask me if they should use Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, I would say yes.

Personally, I don't see one great solution that exceeds in all aspects. Every solution has some good points and I think they have very beautifully found their strength and they're building upon it.

When asked what would best suit me, I would assess their environment requirements and could easily recommend any of the top four, being AWS Redshift, Google, Big Query, and Microsoft Azure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am a consultant, and when I go on-site, it's to determine how they can move to the cloud. Often, clients want to migrate because everyone else is. Others want to because they assume that they are going to save money. They will require less support staff in-house and they won't have to purchase servers.

Customers have a need to cut back on expenses, and equipment. Their servers are becoming obsolete and are required to update their licensing. Rather than doing that and creating a larger overhead, they look into Microsoft Azure. It might be a better way to go and it's less money upfront. 

Some clients have already implemented VMs. A lot of their data is stored that way. There is a difference when you move that to the cloud. 

If you share it back and forth, you have your hybrid where you have it in the cloud and on-premises. It depends on the company and what their plans are.

There is an automated tool that you can analyze your data sources and identify whether or not you can upgrade them and you can also use it for SharePoint. I've used Azure for that purpose.

In regards to data warehouses, I'm doing the upgrades from on-prem to in the cloud, or a combination of both.

With our current COVID situation and being under lockdown, many of the businesses are moving to the cloud and it's been beneficial for us.

Many consulting agencies have set up online businesses where you can reach out and they will do webinars to introduce you to things. I have been involved with that too and it gives customers a taste of things that will give you more of an opportunity to sell it to them.

What I use the most is the tool to identify the upgrades. When you have a data warehouse on-premise you have jobs that run. Similar to an SQL agent, you are not comparing apples to apples, there are differences between the way the jobs are run on Azure versus the on-premises.

We also like governance. It looks at what the requirements are for the company to identify the best way to ensure compliance is met when you move to the cloud.

They can be leary of moving to the cloud, They want to determine when someone has access to the client's data when sharing, and are in the same environment, that the data is secure. Essentially, they are accountable and need to be able to identify how secure their data is for their clients.

Technical support needs to improve.

Microsoft improves all of the time, but there are some things where different vendors offer data warehousing and data governance that you can build and workaround. It would be beneficial to take the top vendors and identify some kind of straightforward action to work with them. Instead of having to employ a separate vendor tool to be able to move this, it would be nice to be able to go through Microsoft.

I have been working with Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse since 2012.

It's in the cloud and updated every six months.

The stability is good.

It's a scalable solution.

Our client's companies vary in size. They are across the board from insurance companies, healthcare, marketing, and manufacturing.

Early on, Microsoft was not good at supporting its product and issues. I had lost a contract because showed up to late to resolve an issue that I was having when doing a comparison between Microsoft and an IBM product, where I wasn't able to transfer the data fast enough.

I have reached out to the technical support team since and some of it is really good, whereas, at other times, you are better to post it online and try to resolve it yourself. They support the tool but don't have to experience with the tool.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

I have used Oracle as a backend, but I am not skilled with Oracle. The frontend has always been with Microsoft.

You couldn't be a novice really and follow it.

As long as you were using the tools already, it's pretty straightforward. 

They do have resources you can contact.

You could have one or two of your team join the Microsoft groups and learn more that way as well. 

There is a lot of planning and setting the right people in motion to work with it.

There is a cost calculator available online that allows you to input your entire scenario, and it will get back to you with information on what the costs are going to be. You can adjust it to include different requirements to best suit your budgeting needs.

Microsoft also offers suggestions on what you would need based on your account.

Microsoft is trying to be more competitive and wants to be very accommodating.

Clients will look at Pro Dell Compare. They use the tool to determine how simple it is or how complicated it will be to move their data. They consider whether they need to make use of one of Microsoft's partners to have them help, or can they do it themselves, and they determine how risky it is along with how simple it will be. Will they have enough manpower, and whether or not they're going to have to hire external consultants to help them. They also consider whether they are going to move their applications or are they going to wait? and what's going to come first. They create a plan.

You want your onsite team to look at, our use cases, look at what we're getting back for information, and then problem-solve. Think about any additional questions, and is this really feasible, because it's not free. You can start out using it for free for a short amount of time.

Microsoft is improving and as they grow, I see that they are pushing towards the enterprise. If you don't quite fit, then you are pushed into it whether you are ready or not.

You really have to consider where you want to be and what you are currently doing.

Anyone looking to use Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, I would advise them to do the research, hire an architect, screen them well, and know their background to ensure that they are going to provide a service for you. Have them work alongside the project manager to identify the resources and what needs to take place and build a plan.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

There are around 10 people using this solution within our organization and we have plans to increase the usage. 

Microsoft Azure uses the Massively Parallel Processing concept for data warehousing. The speed is great and the architecture is excellent. 

Microsoft should develop an interface to make it easier to shift from on-premise to the cloud.

There needs to be a lift and shift tool to move on-premise, IMS high-volume data to synopsis sequence data on the cloud.

I have been using this solution for two years.

The stability is okay, but it could be improved. I believe Microsoft is working on fixing this at the moment.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We used to use an AWF product, but Microsoft Azure is a better cloud-based solution compared to AWF.

Our license is very expensive.

I would recommend this solution to other enterprises.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

The primary use case is for the fast retrieval of data, which is in the data warehouse on-premises and migrating it to the cloud.

The most valuable feature is performance gains.

The scalable nature of the data warehouse on the cloud, and the flexibility that you get, and important features.

I would like to see them provide the ingestion of images.

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

It's a production that keeps changing and we are always using the latest version.

This solution is quite stable. It's in the cloud and we have not faced any issues.

This solution is scalable.

Technical support was not needed because of all of the documentation available.

The initial setup is straightforward.

All of the prices are available online.

My advice would be to move your on-premises data warehouse to the cloud. Move it there faster, as you can get more performance gains and it's also a robust infrastructure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for source analytics and procurement.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the analytics and that it can connect with Power BI. I found it quite interesting and very compelling in terms of detail within a single stack.

I would like my team to be able to build pipelines that integrate with the Azure Data Factory. Some of the best-in-class ETL products that are available in the market, such as Informatica ETL, are far more mature than this solution.

We started implementing projects with Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse about six months ago.

This is a stable product.

Scalability is good and we haven't had any issues.

We have approximately 150 users. We are stable at the moment but we will expand our usage as we get more data.

We have contacted Microsoft support twice, but I do not have much experience with them.

In addition to Azure SQL Data Warehouse, we work with the version that is on-premises.

We are also working with Oracle Data Warehouse and we plan to continue using both of these solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implement this solution for our customers.

If you are using Microsoft products, such as Office 365, then this solution is good because it can take the data from multiple sources. 

This is a good product, but when you compare to Oracle Data Warehouse there are differences in scalability, high availability, and implementation.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are developing our SQL Data Warehouse locally, using SQL Server 2016 on our private cloud, and we will be migrating it to Azure once it is ready.

The company for which I am working deals with products in the leisure industry, such as museums and swimming pools. They use the data warehouse solution for big data reporting. Currently, we are developing a multi-platform data warehouse that can support the reporting requirements for all of the customers. Whatever analytics they want to perform will be done with the data warehouse, and not the SQL database application.

My role is to design the data warehouse, and once that is complete, we need to build the data pipelines so that the data can be moved from the application databases into the warehouse. Then we will design the OLAP servers and OLAP cubes, vertically, to give us a presentation layer on top of the data warehouse. This layer is what the customers will be using.

The most valuable feature is the incremental load because we do not need to refresh the entire data on a daily basis. We have a nightly load where all of the data is updated, and it is a very good feature.

The transaction log shipping gives us the ability to replicate the database onto different servers for backup and synchronization.

The major concern is that I have a hard time with having to version control the data warehouse all the time. As it is now, I have to open all of the ports and push everything onto the server. I would like to see version control implemented into the data warehouse. This would make the tool perfect. 

I have been using this Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse for about two and a half years.

The version that we have been using, 2016, is stable. We have not used the 2019 version in production yet, but there is a team that is evaluating that version right now. I'm not sure of the reason for it not being in production, whether it is related to stability or not.

The scalability is good. I think we are already using a high availability cluster for 2016, so I assume that it will be the same with the 2019 version. We are also using it with our data recovery system, so it is not an issue.

We have approximately twelve to fifteen developers and approx. 900+ customers who will be using the data warehouse. We are acquiring customers on a monthly or quarterly basis, so it is a pretty big user base and we expect that our usage will continue to increase.

We don't have too many technical issues, so overall, I think that it's good enough.

I began with Microsoft SQL Server and have been on the Microsoft platform ever since.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It has been a long time since we first implemented this solution, but since that point, we have created a custom handbook that we can follow in order to set it up.

There are certain design concepts that can be used to design a data warehouse. My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to first study the user's needs, and then go with that approach. The design will be specific to the needs.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.