Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, or Azure Synapse Analytics? When to use what.
summary
Starts from a 6M‑row parquet on ADLS Gen2 and compares ingestion, transformation, cost and runtime across the three Azure options. Azure Data Factory is a GUI ETL with 90 built-in data sources and an integration runtime; data flows use Spark under the hood but offer limited flexibility and no caching. Azure Databricks runs notebooks (Python/Scala/Java/SQL), caches results and in the presented benchmark is fastest and cheapest. Azure Synapse bundles ADF‑like pipelines, Spark and SQL pools and favors tight Azure integration.
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chapters (41)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:43Agenda
- 1:54Household announcements
- 4:33Who is Alice
- 5:44What does Alice need
- 6:19What does the data look like
- 6:40What do we know
- 7:12What do you think
- 7:44What is Azure Data Factory
- 8:58Azure Data Factory Canvas
- 9:37Why you should not use Azure Data Factory
- 11:06What is Databricks
- 11:43Who can use Databricks
- 12:14Why use Databricks
- 13:12Notebooks
- 13:53Technical Knowledge
- 16:58Synapse Analytics
- 17:46Multiple disciplines
- 18:14Comprehensive platform
- 19:14Languages
- 19:50Notebook
- 21:34Error in Databricks
- 22:27Error in Synapse Analytics
- 24:13Lets Compare
- 25:50What should Alice choose
- 26:10Comparing tools
- 26:55Comparing Spark clusters
- 27:44Optimized Spark
- 28:48Implementation Costs
- 29:21Performance
- 29:43Performance comparison
- 30:53Cost comparison
- 31:20Conclusion
- 32:29Benchmarks
- 32:43Summary
- 34:21Maturity vs integration
- 35:23Which should you choose
- 35:47Its not that easy
- 36:49When to use Databricks
- 37:25When to use Synapse
- 38:46Chart to make a decision
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