Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Reviews

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. 

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.

I work for a consulting firm, with many different use cases.

Synapse DW is for traditional data warehousing with a large amount of volume, that requires you to do reporting.

In terms of Synapse Analytics, I haven't put it in yet, but I'm looking at it for kind of one-stop-shop or Swiss Army Knife type projects. They've been asking for a factory or creating something that connects to the cosmos to turn it into analytics reportings, just sort of needless connecting and just making it easy from a developer standpoint to deliver on any sort of business analytics that needs to be done.

I think the most valuable component is that pipelines are built into it and then the feature that you can mirror a cosmos BB for analytics.

I think that there should be better governance. Actual pipeline level security, if you create a pipeline within the tool, because it's a one-stop-shop for everything, you control who has access to what, and that goes for anything, whether it's an internal or an externally managed table. 

I think there needs to be an improvement with support for external tables supporting Spark, but further support of Lakehouse to make it a true data warehousing product where you have this true separation of computes and you have a separation of storage. 

I think it kind of dips its toes in there, but in order to achieve, I think with a vision that Microsoft is doing, trying to get at to replace Bolt, but compete with Snowflake and Databricks at the same time, it needs to have those features on.

In the next release, I would like to see Lakehouse and better governance.

I have been using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics for six months and Synaps for a couple of years.

It's a very stable solution. We have not had any issues with the stability of it.

For its traditional data warehousing, it's scalable.

For Synapse Analytics, I am uncertain about being able to trust it with large volumes, which is what you would expect with Databricks.

There are only three or four people in our organization who do this type of work.

We directly work with Microsoft in everything, so they're very responsive for us and they're definitely very committed to that product.

It's a complicated product.

I am a consultant. I implemented the solution myself.

It's very difficult to price unless you know exactly how the customer is using it.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I think it's definitely something that they should consider. It's come a long way from where it started. 

It's just finished out a public preview and it's great if you're looking to combine a lot of tools into one and you're running a smaller shop. I think it's a great tool.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

This is a data warehousing solution.

The most valuable feature is the scalability. It scales out, so you can build a large database and not have to think about whether it performs, or about connecting to the servers to become larger.

There are several specific features and functions available on the on-premises version that do not work with the cloud version. There are many issues regarding migration.

They are building it more and more, but if you have the same version on local you cannot just go to the cloud because some of the functionalities don't work yet. You would have to re-code everything, and maybe even do it differently.

In terms of documentation, they can make it easier or start with some advising or instruction. As it is now, it's like making a puzzle.

Technical support needs some improvement.

They will need to include some features for the Cloud version.

They can make subsets of the database so you can schedule the marking department to work only between nine to five, but ETL can run at night. 

With a subset database, you can cut costs, similar to Snowflake whose price is a lot lower.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

We have a couple of administrations using this solution and the rest are indirectly using third-party tools. They are developers and administrators.

The support is difficult. I don't think that their support is good.

You can call for help, they take your request, but they don't have an understanding of the tool.

You have to wait a couple of days for someone to call you back.

There have been times where I knew more than they did, so you have to figure it out for yourself.

I am not satisfied with the support, but I do understand that when you have a service desk or a help desk, they cannot go through the entire solution. What I expect is that the second line should, but they don't have a second line.

You submit in a support ticket and three days later you get a callback and have to explain the problem that you are having again. It takes more time.

I have called Microsoft and even they were not sure and nobody could really help me.

The initial setup for me was straightforward, but I have a lot of experience. I think that for some people who are less experienced it would be complex.

It's not just the documentation on what version you need to have and what pricing. It is really difficult.

You have to read a lot to understand what you are doing.

This solution starts at €1000.00 a month for just the basics and can go up to €300,000.00 per month for the fastest version.

It's pay as you go, so you never know what your bill is going to be beforehand, and that's scary for customers. If you have someone who makes a mistake and the program's a loop that is running all night, you could receive a very expensive bill.

The bad side to pay as you go is that sometimes it can stop the enthusiasm of the data scientists, as they are afraid to run a query because they are afraid of the bill and how much it will be.

It's a nice solution for a simple data warehousing, but it's still an immature solution.

It is stable but it takes a lot of time. 

Smaller companies have better products, but the problem will always be there and the smaller company will not survive.

Customers will have tools that are not supported anymore.

Microsoft is so big that people trust them, they will eventually get there but it will take time to get the features with quality. There are, however, some solutions available that are better and cheaper. You can purchase them instead of having to reprogram everything that you have already done.

My advice would be to compare this solution with others. Snowflake would be a comparable solution. It's cheaper, faster, and better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.