Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Reviews

It's used for business case analysis and bandwidth utilization, etc. 

We are using its latest version.

It's feature-rich. It has a wide range of features. 

It's stable, but its stability could be better. However, we understand that it's in production, and new features are getting added and upgraded, so you do get hiccups sometimes.

I've been using this solution for more than four years.

It's quite stable. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of stability. There are very few outages or errors during the configuration.

It's scalable. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability. Our clients are enterprises. 

I haven't contacted them, but it should be fairly good. I haven't had many issues with it.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of the setup. It has a GUI, which is awesome. Its deployment duration varies based on the case to case. We have quite a few SMEs for deployment. 

It doesn't require many people for maintenance.

It has been good so far. I'd recommend it to others. I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our cloud data warehouse. 

The usability has been excellent. 

It offers good integration. 

The product works well with other Azure products.

The initial setup is very convenient.

It is scalable.

We have found the solution to be stable. 

The security is fine.

We'd like the solution to have more analytics capability.

We would like more detail on reports so that they are easy to understand in terms of usage of data and services. It could be improved.

I've been using the solution for one year. 

It's a stable product. It is reliable. The performance is good. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. 

We can scale the product up and down according to our needs.

We have around 100 people using the solution right now. 

My customer uses it on a daily basis.

We are satisfied with technical support. I haven't used them too much.

Neutral

I've also used Snowflake. 

Azure Synapse is a more integrated platform. With Snowflake, you need to buy it separately and run it off Microsoft. Snowflake, however, has better cost control. Snowflake is comparatively cost-efficient.

It is a straightforward setup. It's easy and not overly complex. I have not measured how long it actually takes; however, I can say the implementation is convenient. My administrator handled the setup. I did not handle it directly myself. 

The solution can get expensive, and it's hard to monitor the costs. It does depend on how you utilize it. You can configure it in a certain way.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

We have been using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics as our proof of concept in our data warehouse. As for the analytics part, we have not used it because we do not have any SQL pools. We think it is a bit more than we need because our data is not implicated and the data sets are not very large. It is mostly been used for the detection functions and to link up the sources.

The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics are how easy and quick it is to set up the linked services.

When I was trying to link services to an SFTP site it was not able to do all the possible encryption that I needed. They can improve by adding more encryption options.

I have been using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics for approximately six months.

The solution is incredibly stable. 

The only thing that has not been stable are the pipelines that we are using runtime integration on our on-premise server and something is slowing everything down, it might be a particular ODBC connection. I am not sure if that is due to the Microsoft platform or it might be some other setup or settings that are causing the issue. However, other than this issue, the solution has been brilliant. It has been very reliable and stable.

The solution is scalable. I have changed the interface and most of the operations can be done from the interface by clicking a few buttons, it is quick and easy.

At the moment we only have approximately four people using the solution because it is a data warehouse creation in the back end. We have not reached the stage where our staff will use the product but we are building a single customer view using the platform and we will be increase usage in the future.

The initial installation is straightforward. There is a lot of documentation provided by Microsoft making it very easy to get started.

Having used the serverless option for the database has saved us a lot of money.

We chose the serverless option for the database which has saved us a lot of money. Our costs are approximately £600 per month.

It is beneficial to always plan exactly what the main aims are and then choose the solution that can do it. If you want something quick, I set something up without any knowledge with Azure in three weeks. Once you get going, everything will be at your fingertips.

I rate Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics an eight out of ten.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. It's one of the solution's most valuable aspects.

The useability, the user interface, is very user-friendly.

The solution needs to improve its integration capabilities. It needs better integration with SQL and other databases. 

The initial setup is complex.

The product needs to implement more machine learning and artificial intelligence.

If they had more IoT and streaming capabilities, it would be helpful.

The product could use more analytics tools.

It would be helpful if we could use the product with less coding.

Normally, the solution is quite stable. The performance is pretty good. We don't regularly deal with issues. It doesn't crash or freeze, and I can't recall any bugs or glitches.

The solution can scale, however, it is expensive to do so. If a company wants to expand, it will have to pay. Therefore, they should be prepared for that.

Currently, we have about 200 people using the solution.

I don't have a direct relationship with the technical support when I have a problem. They aren't very good. We aren't satisfied with the level of support we get.

The initial setup is not too straightforward. It's rather complex. We had to get some outside assistance.

The deployment process took us about three months. It was a while.

We hired a consultant to help us with the implementation of the solution.

I don't have exact KPIs on this, however, I need to improve the sizing in order to improve our ROI.

The is a monthly licensing fee. I can't speak to how much we actually pay, however.

There is just one fee. You do not have any more costs over and above that.

While we didn't previously evaluate other options, in 2021, we need to explore the other solutions. I intend to look at the Amazon and Google Cloud platforms as other options.

We are both partners and end-users of the product. We use it internally and we use it with some of our clients.

I would caution new users that there is one parameter they need to watch carefully. That is the size of the data warehouse. If you don't configure this parameter to be as small as possible, your costs will be quite high.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. It's a stable platform, however, the price model is questionable in comparison to Amazon and Google and the contact with support is a problem for me. 

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.

We are a consulting agency and the Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse is what we use for general BI reporting and visualization.

The most valuable feature is that you can suspend the computer if it is not being used, which means that you don't incur costs. This is better than Amazon Redshift, where the costs continue to accumulate.

The documentation is good.

This solution needs to have query caching so that if the same query is run and the results are available, it will return the data from the cache without having to re-run the query. As it is now, you still have to use compute for each query.

We would like to have integration with the data lake so that we can avoid retrieving the data from it, just to store it in Synapse before we can use it. From an architectural perspective, avoiding this replication would be good.

I have been using this product for about one year.

Stability-wise, this is a good product.

This solution is scalable, although I don't expect that we will expand it beyond the current usage.

We have not had to reach out to support. Rather, we have relied on the documentation. It is easy to solve your own problems.

I also have experience with using Snowflake. It has the option to cache query results, which is helpful. 

Amazon Redshift is another similar solution that I have experience with, although it lacks the ability to suspend the computer to save costs when it is not being used.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The Azure SQL Data Warehouse has been renamed to Synapse, although not all of the features have been implemented yet. I am looking forward to a more mature version of this product in the future.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.

 I'm a senior consultant.

For those working in the retail sector, this product can capture all the transactional data throughout a company's stores, process them, and put them into the Azure Synapses. Once you have the data, you can clean and aggregate it. On top of that, it has a reporting tool so you can connect to those Data Warehouse Synapses and pull up your reports which can then be used to prepare the dashboards and enable more insight.

Non-structured data is unavailable with this product. 

The solution is stable. 

Azure Synapse is serverless architecture, so you can scale as and when required. It makes no difference if there are 100 users or 1,000 users. We have around 50,000 end users.

The customer support is generally quite good. They follow up relatively quickly although it can sometimes take more time if it requires an SOP to follow up. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a matter of connecting to your visual studio or management studio.

It's important to understand your business needs and choose an appropriate solution based on the industry you work in and what needs to be achieved. There are a lot of tools available on the market, it's important to get the right one. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.