We are a marketing company so we help our customers with marketing strategies. The marketing is based on the final customers, and we use Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics for CDP.
The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is the pipeline that is the ETL tool. It's very well designed and is overall very good. We usually don't use the ETL tool in Databricks, but we use the ETL tool in this solution.
The SQL features in the solution are very good.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve the section in the solution where you can implement the Python Spark pipelines, it's not the same as in Databricks which would be better.
The data visualization in Microsoft Azure is provided by Power BI, it's not needed to have something in Synapse. The data governance tool is outside Synapse, but there is a data governance tool that is called Purview in Microsoft Azure. They need to improve the Spark part of the solution then it would be complete.
I have been using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics for approximately two years.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is highly stable because it's based on SQL Server technology. It's a very old technology, which is solid.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is scalable.
I did not use another solution similar to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics.
The initial setup of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is simple. It's a managed service in Microsoft Azure, you only need to search for it and install it.
You have to be very careful with one specific service inside Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics which is called the Sequel Data Warehouse Dedicated. It is very reliable and performs well, but it's expensive. You need to define the tier well because you can choose between several tiers and you have to define which suits your needs and not overperform the tier because it's quite expensive.
Once a service is managed as a service in a cloud platform, the maintenance is very easy. You have to monitor it, but the maintenance infrastructure is extremely easy.
This solution is very easy once you have a Microsoft Azure subscription to go straight to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics because it's native. However, there are other kinds of technologies one can use. I would suggest before using this solution, look at other solutions, such as Databricks or Snowflake, and not stop at the first solution that you can receive in Microsoft Azure.
I rate Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics an eight out of ten.