Azure Data Factory Reviews

The solution is primarily used for data integration. We are using it for the data pipelines to get data out of the legacy systems and provide it to the Azure SQL Database. We are using the SQL data source providers mainly.

The data pipeline and the orchestration functionality are the most valuable aspects of the solution.

The interface is very good. It seeks to be very responsive and intuitive.

The initial setup is very quick and easy.

I'm more of a general manager. I don't have any insights in terms of missing features or items of that nature.

Integration of data lineage would be a nice feature in terms of DevOps integration. It would make implementation for a company much easier. I'm not sure if that's already available or not. However, that would be a great feature to add if it isn't already there.

We've used the solution for the last 12 months or so.

From what I have witnessed, the solution is quite stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

We work with medium to enterprise-level organizations. Customers have anywhere from 300 employees up to 160,000 employees.

Microsoft offers a great community. There's a lot of support available. We're quite satisfied with the level of assistance on offer.

Since the solution is a service, it's basically just a click and run setup. It's very simple. There's very little implementation necessary. A company should be able to easily arrange it. The deployment doesn't take very long at all.

We do provide the implementation for our clients. We're able to provide templates as well. We have predefined implementation space in Data Factory and provide it to the customer.

While clients might individually evaluate other options, however, we're not aware of that information. I can't say what other solution clients might consider before ultimately choosing Microsoft. I would say that it is likely Talend and maybe SQL Server Integration Services.

We are like an integrator. We are a data warehouse NPI consulting company and we use Data Factory to pull data from different legacy systems and do all these transformations that are necessary in order to provide analytical models.

In our normal scenario is that we are providing Azure SQL Databases together with Azure Data Factory and Power BI. 80% of our customers have recognized such a scenario.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at an eight. We've been largely happy with the capabilities of the product.

We are not using this product specifically as a data factory. We have taken Synapse Analytics as the entire component for the data warehousing solution. Azure Data Factory is one of the components of that, and we are using it for ETL. 

Prior to this, we did not have a proper data warehousing solution. Instead, we had segregation between different tools like Oracle Data Warehouse, Exadata, and other products. Now, most of the tools that we have are from Microsoft, including Power BI, which has been rolled out throughout the organization. Synapse was the better choice for us to implement, as it has a lot of out-of-the-box connectors that we can utilize for data transformation and organization. 

The best part of this product is the extraction, transformation, and load. In fact, we have found that the three of them work quite well. We are implementing the cloud-based system right now.

We see a lot of improvement with the most recent version of this solution. Some of the new features are very important to us.

The need to work more on developing out-of-the-box connectors for other products like Oracle, AWS, and others.

We have been working with Azure Data Factory for approximately six months. We are still implementing and it is not live, yet, but we expect it to be in 2021.

I have found it to be quite stable. Here and there, there could be some issues and problems but overall, I'm okay with the product.

Scalability is one of the points that we were looking for because we are hosting approximately two terabytes of data and we expect that it will grow at least five times over the next two years. This is one of the reasons that we adopted this solution.

In perhaps a year, we will increase our usage.

The technical support from Microsoft is quite good. if you get good resources and they can provide you with free consulting, then it is quite good. However, when you purchase paid consulting and dedicated support, it is quite costly compared to the market.

I don't think that the initial setup was very complex. We have quite an advanced IT infrastructure team and the Microsoft FastTrack team also helped us a lot during the programming of the development and setup.

I would not say that this product is overly expensive. It is competing with the other providers, and they have almost the same pricing model.

In general, I would recommend this product. However, it depends on the target IT ecosystem. If they are utilizing a lot of Microsoft products like Power BI, Office, Project, SharePoint, and so forth, it's better to implement Data Factory because it will reduce a lot of effort spent to consume data from other sources.

At this point, I can only rate based on my pre-implementation experience, so I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is integrating data from different ERP systems and loading it into Azure Synapse for reporting. We use Power BI for the reporting side of it.

We also have customers who are migrating to Azure Data Factory and we are assisting them with making the transition.

It is easy to integrate.

I do not foresee any issues with security.

I find that Azure Data Factory is still maturing, so there are issues. For example, there are many features missing that you can find in other products.

You cannot use a custom data delimiter, which means that you have problems receiving data in certain formats. For example, there are problems dealing with data that is comma-delimited.

I have been using Azure Data Factor for almost one year.

The stability is dependent on how you set up your cloud infrastructure, and how you authorize people to make use of it.

I have not seen any issues with respect to scalability, as it is all hosted within the cloud. We have approximately 20 users.

I have been in contact with technical support, although most of the time I was told that the feature I was interested in was not yet available. In these cases, they will be implementing the missing features in the future.

I use several similar products by different vendors including Talend, Informatica, and Microsoft SSIS. The biggest advantage that Azure has is deployment. However, in others, it is possible to specify custom data delimiters.

The initial setup is pretty simple and it can be deployed in a couple of hours.

I deployed it myself and am also responsible for maintenance.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

I use this primarily for ETL tasks.

The most valuable feature is the ease in which you can create an ETL pipeline.

The GUI is very helpful when it comes to creating pipelines. The user interface is also very fast.

The connection to Snowflake is easy. I can store data and transform it during the ETL process before sending it to Snowflake.

Azure Data Factory is a bit complicated compared to Informatica. There are a lot of connectors that are missing and there are a lot of instances where I need to create a server and install Integration Runtime.

The support and the documentation can be improved.

There are a lot of tasks that you need to write code for.

I have been using Azure Data Factory for about six months.

I have experience with Informatica and I find it easier to use. For example, there are a lot of connectors that are directly available. Also, Informatica is able to take incremental copies, but with Azure, you have to write code to do that.

I have also worked with Matillion and Fivetran, and I feel that there are a lot of things that Azure can learn from these products. For example, with Fivetran there are very good connectors for copying data between other solutions. This is unlike Azure, where a lot of the time, I have to build my own logic.

The initial setup is complex.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It's an integration platform, we migrate data across hybrid environments. We have data in our cloud environment or on-prem system so we use it for when we want to integrate data across different environments. It was a problem for us to get data from different hybrid environments.

From my experience so far, the best feature is the ability to copy data to any environment. We have 100 connectors and we can connect them to the system and copy the data from its respective system to any environment. That is the best feature. 

The user interface could use improvement. It's not a major issue but it's something that can be improved. 

It has the ability to create separate folders to organize objects, Data Factory objects. But any time that we created a folder we were not able to create objects. We had to drag and drop into the folder. There were no default options. It was manual work. We offered their team our feedback and they accepted my request.

I have been using Azure Data Factory for around one year. 

Based on my experience with other products on the market, the stability is good. 

I haven't had much experience with scalability. I know we do have scalability options though. It's used daily. 

There are around 1,000 plus users using this solution in my company. 

It requires two people for maintenance. The administrators are the ones who maintain it and give access to the engineers. They regulate who has privileges. 

We have needed to contact their technical support. If we can't find the answers ourselves on the blogs, we contact them with our questions. We get most of the answers we need from the blogs but if not then we can directly speak to the Microsoft team from the Data Factory interface itself, it's really helpful.

I have only used Data Factory for the cloud. For on-prem we have used SSIS.

The initial setup was a bit complex but once you understand its setup, it's less complex. There are certain processes that need to be followed. Once you understand the process, it becomes easier to implement.

The implementation took a little less than one day. The planning for the deployment takes around one or two days. 

We had a discussion with the Microsoft team about the data. We discussed how we were going to implement. Based on the discussion we were able to deploy. A Microsoft partner helped us with some parts. 

We also evaluated AWS.

The advice that I would give to someone considering this solution is to have some background in data warehousing and ETL concepts. Have the background about data warehousing and ETL that extract, transform, and load. If you have the background you need, you will be successful. If not, then my advice would be to learn a little more about it before using Data Factory.

I would rate Data Factory as an eight out of ten. 

The platform simplifies data access and visualization with minimal coding, catering to various data management needs across different client projects.

The product centralizes data workflows, enhancing data integration efficiency and visualization for comprehensive analysis.

The platform excels in data transformation with its user-friendly interface and robust monitoring capabilities, making ETL processes seamless.

The product integration with advanced coding options could cater to users needing more customization.

I've been using Azure Data Factory for almost a year now.

The product is stable. 

The product is scalable. 

The initial setup process is straightforward. 

Azure products generally offer competitive pricing, suitable for diverse budget considerations.

Data Factory integrates seamlessly within the Azure ecosystem, offering robust data management capabilities across large-scale projects.

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution to move data from on-premises to the cloud.

The tool’s workflow is not user-friendly. It should also improve its orchestration monitoring.

I have been using the product since 2019.

The tool is a stable product.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is mainly for ETL and transforming the data and then using it for power VA. So there we are handling multiple projects. It is not just a single thing, but mainly used at the end is data analytics only.

I would like to see this time travel feature in Snowflake added to Azure Data Factory. In addition to taking care of data internally, how it is instead of using indexing, they have some different mechanisms to quickly execute the query instead of normal indexes. Both of these would be great to see implemented in future upgrades.

I have been working with Azure Data Factory for the past twelve months.

I am one hundred percent happy with the stability.

Technical support is excellent.

Positive

I would rate Azure Data Factory an eight on a scale of one to ten.