We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Snowflake based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Snowflake had a better user rating regarding ease of deployment and pricing. Both softwares had the same rating when it came to service and support. In terms of features, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics users felt the software had security issues and didn’t feel it was very intuitive. In contrast, users of Snowflake felt the UI needed improvement.
"The features we've found most valuable for data warehouses is extracting data, SSIS packages, and the DBs."
"The pricing seems to be quite fair."
"We find the serverless tool to be the most valuable feature ."
"The solution can scale."
"The solution has been working well overall."
"Scaling this solution is easy and the uptime is okay."
"It's user-friendly and has a good dashboard."
"Its scalability and ease of use are valuable. It is fairly simple for a tool that's that powerful. If you have a background in Microsoft SQL Server, it is a very easy-to-transition path."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just need to follow the documentation."
"The most valuable feature is the clone copy."
"It is a very good platform. It can handle structured and semi-structured data, and it can be used for your data warehouse or data lake. It can load and deal with any data that you have. It can extract data from an on-premises database or a website and make it available in the cloud. It has very fast implementation and integration as compared to other solutions. There is no need for the DBA to manage or do the day-to-day DBA tasks, which is one of the greatest things about it."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is its performance. We can access the data quickly. Additionally, it handles structured and non-structured data."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"The solution should offer a serverless model like Snowflake."
"I would like to see version control implemented into the data warehouse."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"The product could be more feature-rich."
"Synapse makes it easy to integrate and onboard data from other Microsoft and Azure sources. The interface is familiar because we were using Azure Data Factory before Synapse. It made the transition even easier because the Synapse interface is exactly the same."
"The linked services can be improved. We can create dynamic linked services to access a lot of databases but only those of the same type. For example, I can use the same linked services to access 11 SQL databases. However, if I have 11 SQL databases and five Oracle databases, I need two dynamic linked services. I cannot do it with only one linked service. The UI also needs to be improved. When I have used Azure Synapse for programming with PySpark, Scala, or .NET, for example, the UI has been unstable. If I open two notebooks for programming, one notebook will queue the session of the other."
"Integration with other products is an area that can be improved."
"It needs strong support for social media, internet data, and native support for NoSQL."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
"I think that Snowflake could improve its user interface. The current one is not interactive."
"Sometimes it can be tricky to manage multiple environments if you're purely using Snowflake as your scripting and pipeline environment."
"It would be helpful if Snowflake could create good reports instead of using Power BI reports."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."
"The documentation could improve. They should provide architecture information."
"I have heard people having difficulty with the machine learning model, so there may be room for improvement."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 86 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "No competitors provide the entire solution to one place ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Azure Data Factory, SAP BW4HANA, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Teradata and Amazon Redshift, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Dremio. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake report.
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