Azure Data Factory Reviews

We use this solution to quickly instantiate certain components in Azure with the aim of having consistent use of certain components and objects. It provides one point of reference rather than having the need to replicate points of references, and then having to keep them in sync. 

It has helped our company by providing consistency. For example, by making sure that the way certain objects and components are defined is consistent throughout every step. If things change at any point, they should be reflected at all points. It's the consistency that makes implementations less buggy and less complex.

The function is the central point of reference and the most valuable thing about Data Factory.

I'd like to see videos on YouTube or the Microsoft site with more detailed implementations. The solution lacks a decent UI that allows us to see what kinds of requests are for what objects and how the population of objects is being requested and compared. Right now we have to look at logs to get an idea of what types of calls the data factory receives in what sequence, for example. It would be nice to be able to see it graphically because we currently have to interpret the logs and then create a graphical representation to have an idea of what's going on. In general, it could be simplified and made more user-friendly.

I've been using this solution for six months.

This solution is stable. 

There are thousands of users so the solution is scalable. 

The customer service is excellent. 

Positive

I previously used a combination of solutions to achieve the same end. Data Factory simplifies things which is why we switched to it. 

The initial setup was complex. The deployment was carried out in-house and we had around 10 people involved in the implementation. 

In terms of time and effort savings, we have a return on our investment. 

It's important to have a good data model before you start using the solution; an idea of the types of data architecture, data objects and components in order to use them. Because of the lack of more user-friendly interfaces, especially for the people debugging the system, I rate this solution eight out of 10.

Essentially, Azure Data Factory is more aligned to ETL, but I wanted to provide a solution for a full data lake solution where I could leverage functionality, whether it is ETL, data ingestion, data warehousing, or data lake.

I was planning to switch to Synapse and was just looking into Synapse options.

I wanted to plug things in and then put them into Power BI. Basically, I'm planning to shift some data, leveraging the skills I wanted to use Synapse for performance.

I am not a frequent user, and I am not an Azure Data Factory engineer or data engineer. I work as an enterprise architect. Data Factory, in essence, becomes a component of my solution. I see the fitment and plan on using it. It could be Azure Data Factory or Data Lake, but I'm not sure what enhancements it would require.

User-friendliness and user effectiveness are unquestionably important, and it may be a good option here to improve the user experience. However, I believe that more and more sophisticated monitoring would be beneficial.

I work as an enterprise architect, and I have been using Azure Data Factory for more than a year.

I am working with the latest version.

Azure Data Factory is a stable solution.

Azure Data Factory is a scalable product.

In my current company, I have a team of five people, but in my previous organization, there were 20.

Technical support is good. We encountered no technical difficulties. Microsoft supported us when we planned to provision Azure Data Factory over a private link. As a result, we received excellent support from Microsoft.

Products such as Azure Data Factory and Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog were evaluated. This is something I'm working on. I work as an enterprise architect, so these are the tools that I frequently use.

Previously, I worked with SSIS. We did not change. Because we were building a cloud-based ETF solution Azure Data Factory was an option, but when it came to on-premises solutions, the SQL server integrating the SSIS tool was one option.

The initial setup is easy.

It took three to four weeks to get up to speed and get comfortable using it.

Pricing appears to be reasonable in my opinion.

My only advice is that Azure Data Factory, particularly for data ingestion, is a good choice. But if you want to go further and build an entire data lake solution, I believe Synapse, is preferred. In fact, Microsoft is developing and designing it in such a way that, it's an entirely clubbing of data ingestion, and data lake, for all things. They must make a decision: is the solution dedicated to only doing that type of data ingestion, in which case I believe Data Factory is the best option.

I would have preferred, but I'm not a frequent user there right now. I need to think beyond Data Factory as an open-source project to include machines and everything else. As a result, as previously stated, Data Factory becomes very small at the enterprise architect level. I was inundated with power automation, power ops, power virtualizations, and everything else in Microsoft that I had to think about.

I would rate Azure Data Factory a seven out of ten.

We use Data Factory for automating ETL processes, data management, digital transformation, and scheduled automated processes. My team has about 11 people, and at least five use Data Factory. It's mostly data engineers and analysts. 

Each data analyst and engineer manages a few projects for clients. Typically, it's one person per client, but we might have two or three people managing and building out pipelines for a larger project.  

It's cloud-based, allowing multiple users to easily access the solution from the office or remote locations. I like that we can set up the security protocols for IP addresses, like allow lists. It's a pretty user-friendly product as well. The interface and build environment where you create pipelines are easy to use. It's straightforward to manage the digital transformation pipelines we build.

Data Factory has so many features that it can be a little difficult or confusing to find some settings and configurations. I'm sure there's a way to make it a little easier to navigate.

In the main ADF web portal could, there's a section for monitoring jobs that are currently running so you can see if recent jobs have failed. There's an app for working with Azure in general where you can look at some segs in your account. It would be nice if Azure had an app that lets you access the monitoring layer of Data Factory from your phone or a tablet, so you could do a quick check-in on the status of certain jobs. That could be useful.

We've been using Azure Data Factory for about three years.

I've been happy with it overall. I don't think we've had any major issues. We've been able to do what we needed, whether connecting to different data sources or setting up different types of transformations and processes. 

It's a cloud solution, so it's inherently scalable. I don't know If we have to raise the limits on resources like clusters and processing power or if it will just automatically scale up. I can't remember offhand. 

We managed the same actions with a combination of tools. We used SFTP servers to move data from one place to another. We used scripts for loading and some other stored procedures or processes for data transformation within a database. It took two or three pieces of technology or systems to manage the same types of operation. Data Factory lets us consolidate those steps into a single pipeline. 

Setting up Azure Data Factory is pretty straightforward. We had an Azure account already, and Data Factory was just something we could add as an extra service. We had to create instances and pipelines, and it took us about two weeks to get our first pipelines scheduled and running. 

We do everything in-house.

We see a return on Data Factory if we compare the time and effort that would be necessary to perform the equivalent processes manually. 

I'm not too familiar with the cost, but I believe we're reasonably happy with what we're paying. My understanding is that the cost of Data Factory is tied to consumption. It depends on the amount of data or the number of pipelines running, and the cost varies from month to month depending on the usage. 

You'll obviously pay more if you're scheduling heavy digital transformation processes to run every hour, but I don't think there are any other hidden costs or anything extra. When you set up a new account, you have a trial period that enables you to create a test pipeline or process that's typical of your use case and then do a benchmark test to see if Data Factory can achieve the efficiency you need. You'll also get some idea of how much the process will cost to run. From there, it's straightforward to do a cost evaluation or comparison to see if it's the right fit for your company. 

We were looking for a single solution, and Data Factory was the first one that interested us. I don't think we looked at many others. We were pretty set on Azure, and Data Factory seemed to fit our needs, so we didn't make a full comparison with the alternatives.

I rate Azure Data Factory nine out of 10. It isn't perfect, but it's solid. Data Factory has improved how we deal with various aspects of Azure. It has always met our needs in terms of the transformations and jobs we want to create and schedule. 

I mainly use Data Factory to load data for ETL processes or to Azure Storage and for testing purposes in our business unit.

Data Factory's most valuable feature is Copy Activity.

I've been using Data Factory for around two years.

Data Factory is stable.

We've had no problems with Data Factory's scalability.

Microsoft's technical support is responsive and quick to help.

We used consultants to implement Data Factory.

Data Factory's cost is too high.

I would advise anybody thinking of implementing Data Factory to calculate their costs at the initial stage in order to have some knowledge about future costs for the whole project. I would rate Data Factory as eight out of ten.

The platform simplifies data access and visualization with minimal coding, catering to various data management needs across different client projects.

The product centralizes data workflows, enhancing data integration efficiency and visualization for comprehensive analysis.

The platform excels in data transformation with its user-friendly interface and robust monitoring capabilities, making ETL processes seamless.

The product integration with advanced coding options could cater to users needing more customization.

I've been using Azure Data Factory for almost a year now.

The product is stable. 

The product is scalable. 

The initial setup process is straightforward. 

Azure products generally offer competitive pricing, suitable for diverse budget considerations.

Data Factory integrates seamlessly within the Azure ecosystem, offering robust data management capabilities across large-scale projects.

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case is for traditional ETL; moving data from the web and data sources to a data warehouse. I've also used Data Factory for batch processing and recently for streaming data sets. We have a partnership with Microsoft and I am a cloud solution architect.

There are a lot of innovative features that Microsoft releases regularly. The UI is easy to navigate and finding information on new features has proven to be quite easy. I like that I can retrieve VTL code pretty quickly without knowing in-depth coding languages like Python. Microsoft has very good support teams that I've dealt with and they are very helpful in resolving problems.

Improvement could be made around streaming data because I feel that the Data Factory product is mainly geared for batch processing and doesn't yet have in-built streaming data processing. Perhaps it's on the way and they are making some changes to help facilitate that. If they were to include better monitoring that would be useful. I'd like to see improved notifications of what the actual errors are.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The way we've used the product is around streaming data, and that doesn't work well with Data Factory. As loads increase, some of the underlying infrastructure that gets used to process data seems to slow down. This is basically a development product, so in terms of scalability it doesn't have a wide user base, it's only meant for developers and analysts. The number of users will vary from anywhere between one to five people. 

The customer service is excellent. 

I've previously used Microsoft SSIS, which is the last incarnation of Azure Data Factory. I've also used IBM Data Manager and Teradata's Management Loads, so I have quite a bit of experience in this area. One of the major differences is that Azure Data Factory is a SaaS service. The other solutions were in-house and you managed your own infrastructure to run them. What I get from Data Factory is a lot better than what I got for the other products. Azure Data Factory is great because it's evolving day-to-day.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. That's assuming that when you're creating the Data Factory, you have some knowledge about how to create it. We deployed in-house and it took about ten minutes for the initial creation process. The provisioning itself is not something you have control over because it's a self-service that does what it needs and happens in the background. The infrastructure doesn't require any maintenance, it's all managed on the backend. There is maintenance in terms of your codes, connections, and the like, but that is separate from the infrastructure maintenance.

The Data Factory itself will not give you a return on investment, it's the entire solution that brings a return, I'd say at least 20% to 30% of return for investment over a five-year period. 

Azure Data factory is a pay-as-you-go service so cost depends on the number of connections, how many times each activity in that node is run, and how much data gets moved. There are a number of factors that define the price, but it pairs with your service. You're charged for the amount of data that's moved, but there are no charges for the features you use.

I would definitely recommend this solution. If you decide to implement Data Factory, I suggest reaching out to qualified professionals because there are a lot of moving parts. That said, if you have internally qualified staff, deployment shouldn't be a problem. Apart from a few minor issues, it's pretty reliable with good support and a whole bunch of resources available on the web.

I rate this solution a solid nine out of 10. 

Data Factory's best features include its data source connections, GUI for building data pipelines, and target loading within Azure. It's also highly configurable and integrates well with the rest of the Azure services.

Data Factory's performance during heavy data processing isn't great.

Data Factory is stable - I have customers running thousands of jobs a day without problems.

Data Factory is scalable.

Microsoft's technical support is pretty good.

The initial setup is complex because there are a lot of prerequisites, including plumbing in the network, but that's typical for any cloud-based solution.

Data Factory is a good, mature solution, and I would rate it as eight out of ten.

I use Azure Data Factory in my company because we are implementing a lot of different projects for a big company based in the USA. We're getting certain information from different sources—for example, some files in the Azure Blob Storage. We're migrating that information to other databases. We are validating and transforming the data. After that, we put that data in some databases in Azure Synapse and SQL databases.

I think it makes it very easy to understand what data flow is and so on. You can leverage the user interface to do the different data flows, and it's great. I like it a lot.

It would be better if it had machine learning capabilities. For example, at the moment, we're working with Databricks and Azure Data Factory. But Databricks is very complex to do the different data flows. It could be great to have more functionalities to do that in Azure Data Factory.

I have been using Azure Data Factory for about one year.

Azure Data Factory is a stable solution.

It's scalable. We're doing a lot of different integrations with a lot of data, and scalability is great.

The initial setup is straightforward. I think that it's so easy to start a project using that technology.

We have a team that's in charge of doing the deployments in Azure in different environments.

I would tell potential users that there are many technologies to do this. For example, if you like to manage big data and do something with it, it would be better to use Databricks.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Azure Data Factory a nine.