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.
"We use Azure Synapse Analytics in many different areas and industries, so I like that you can administrate and create pipelines for difference sources of data and later integrate and deploy it to other internal areas, such as separate dashboards for financials, and so on."
"The most valuable feature is the level of processing power, and being able to complete tasks in parallel."
"The speed is great and the architecture is excellent."
"The MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) architecture helps to make things a lot faster."
"The most valuable aspect of this Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is its consolidation of technical support from Microsoft, and its ability to securely host large quantities of data within the cloud environment. The overall ability to manage and maintain Big Data within the cloud provides a heightened level of efficiency, reliability, and support from Microsoft. This results in a superior user experience and an increased level of value for the end user."
"I like the keynotes and their simplicity. Like other Microsoft products, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is simple to understand and use."
"The solution's scalability is very, very good. It's one of the most important aspects for us."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"The product is quite fast."
"It was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"It helped us to build MVP (minimum viable product) for our idea of building a data warehouse model for small businesses."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics's overall integration within the Azure ecosystem could improve. The native Microsoft solution versus another solution, such as Databricks, there are areas where there could be some improvements."
"Scaling this solution up and down is not quick and easy. This could be improved. The pricing of this solution could also be improved."
"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."
"Indicating what areas need improvement in this solution is a difficult question because the organizations that I am working for are really new in this area. However, an even better more simple interface, or perhaps an extension of a connector app store solution, would be helpful."
"The platform is not flexible, and the graphical user interface needs to be improved because the interface makes it hard for the end user to use it."
"Documentation could be improved."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve in usability. I have found the same issue with all Microsoft solutions."
"It needs strong support for social media, internet data, and native support for NoSQL."
"Getting data out of the tool to third-party applications is difficult."
"There is a scope for improvement. They don't currently support integration with some of the Azure and AWS native services. It would be good if they can enhance their product to integrate with these services."
"These days, they are pushing users towards the GUI or graphical version. However, I am more familiar with the classic version. I'd like to continue to work with it using the older approach."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
"Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that."
"There are a lot of features that they need to come up with. A lot of functions are missing in Snowflake, so we have to find a workaround for those. For example, OUTER APPLY is a basic function in SQL Server, but it is not there in Snowflake. So, you have to write complex code for it."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"I am still in the learning stage. It has good security, but it can always be more secure."
More Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics Pricing and Cost Advice →
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 85 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 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 SAP BW4HANA. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. Snowflake report.
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