Microsoft Azure Data Factory

What differentiates Microsoft Azure Data Factory from other similar products?

There are many similar products from different cloud vendors, but Azure Data Factory stood out to us as we have a heavy Azure infra skilled resources and easy to integrate with other servies inside Azure.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Data wrangling, mapping and transformation are the most interesting features along with its ability to serve multiple platforms ranging from Azure native, on-prem and other CSP and openstack cloud on colo facilities.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Most of the solution is implemented with expectation of use of Azure as the core environement, there will be some extra tasks that need to be performed for integration with other CSP.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Before planning a long term solution for this, run though your Dev, test and POC for a extended period. In those period try using other CSP also before taking any decision.

What differentiates Microsoft Azure Data Factory from other similar products?

The difference between the solution and other products is its focus on extraction. Other items such as formation are included but the main focus remains on extraction.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Azure Data Factory is one stop solution for those use cases where it have multiple data sources to pull into datawarehouse. The best part is to connect easily with provided link services or 3rd party resources.

What do you dislike most about this product?

I like Azure Data Factory because it can be used for conventional ETL and ELT with a few mouse clicks, as it can be flexibly scaled horizontally and vertically.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

"Azure Data Factory helps us on data movement, integration and transformation. We can automate the process on collecting data sources (e.g. file system) and move the data to destination (e.g Azure Synapse). We can use then use the data for visualisation. Azure Data Factory is an important component in our data engineering architecture."

What differentiates Microsoft Azure Data Factory from other similar products?

Microsoft Azure Data Factory differs from other similar products due to its ability to seamlessly combine with other Microsoft services such as Power BI, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Machine Learning. It also offers a wide range of connectors to different data sources and allows for easy scheduling and monitoring of data pipelines. Azure Data Factory provides a user-friendly interface for creating and managing data pipelines, making it easy for users to orchestrate complex data workflows.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

My favorite aspect of Microsoft Azure Data Factory is the automation of data workflows across different sources and destinations. It also provides a range of built-in data transformation and processing capabilities, such as data cleansing, aggregation, and enrichment, which can be used to prepare data for downstream analysis or reporting.

What do you dislike most about this product?

In the case of using Microsoft Azure Data Factory, I haven't found what I dislike most about it except for some little errors encountered that were quickly rectified.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Azure Data Factory offers a range of data integration capabilities, including data movement and transformation, as well as the ability to orchestrate complex data workflows. My recommendations for anyone trying to consider this product is to first consider the cost and to check if the platform aligns with exactly what you want to achieve in your organization.