"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"Technical support is okay in terms of the help they provide."
"Overall deployment and integration is pretty fast."
"Fills the gap between big data and classic data warehouses."
"The solution's scalability is very, very good. It's one of the most important aspects for us."
"I have been working with Microsoft, and they have been very helpful."
"Its seamless integration with Azure services is most valuable. If somebody wants to use all Azure services, it is the best solution."
"We have found that it is easy to develop and to do the analytics in the modules of data."
"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."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"Microsoft should develop an interface to make it easier to shift from on-premise to the cloud."
"Synapse Analytics is generally stable, but its performance can be slow when performing very large datasets."
"Unfortunately, we have had some issues with the dashboard reporting. Sometimes, the data for specific periods would just appear blank on the dashboard. To investigate this, we worked with a Microsoft incident agent and it turned out to be a result of bugs in the platform when dealing with specific types of queries in Azure Data Factory."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The need to improve a little bit in terms of user-friendliness."
"The major challenge that we're seeing with Azure Synapse is around security concerns. The way it is working right now, it has Managed VNet by Microsoft option, similar to the implementation of Azure Databricks, which may pose a concern for financial institutions. For managed environments, the banks have very strict policies around data being onboarded to those environments. For some confidential applications, the banks have the policy to encrypt it with their own key, so it is sort of like Bring Your Own Key, but it is not possible to manage the resources with Microsoft or Databricks, which is probably the major challenge with Azure Synapse. There should be more compatibility with SQL Server. It should be easier to migrate solutions between different environments because right now, it is not really competitive. It is not like you can go and install SQL Database in some other environment. You will have to go through some migration projects, which probably is one of the major showstoppers for any bank. When they consider Synapse, they not only consider the investment in the actual service; they also consider the cost of the migration process. When you scale out or scale down your system, it becomes unavailable for a few minutes. Because it is a data warehouse environment, it is not such a huge deal, but it would be great if they can improve it so that the platform is available during the change of configuration."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics could improve its compatibility with Visual Studio. One of the challenges for people moving from an on-premise to a cloud solution, such as Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, is that you're constantly working in a browser. There are people that have been working for decades on desktop applications. For them to start working in a browser, it's quite a change. Allowing people to work and do their work inside Visual Studio than in the browser, would be a large advantage."
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AWS Lake Formation is ranked 11th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 3 reviews while Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 44 reviews. AWS Lake Formation is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of AWS Lake Formation writes "Good security, excellent online resources and easy to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "Scalable, intuitive, facilitates compliance and keeping your data secure". AWS Lake Formation is most compared with Snowflake, Azure Data Factory, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR and Apache Hadoop, whereas Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Azure Data Factory, Apache Hadoop and Teradata. See our AWS Lake Formation vs. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics report.
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