Synapse/Data Factory and Dataverse

Question

Have had a look around but can't see any concrete information. Essentially, if anyone could help it would be great. We are building reporting in the cloud and looking to ingest data from Dataverse that can then be reported on in Power BI

Looking at everything i can see, there is Azure Synapse and Data Factory. What i am trying to understand and learn is whether we use either ADF or Synapse or if its a combination of both

Going into ADF Studio and Synapse Studio, they look very similar so not quite sure what i should be using for this

If anyone could help or provide some info, that would be great

Thanks

Answer 1

Azure synapse provides all the functionalities of Azure Data factory and even more. Using both Azure Synapse studio and Azure data factory, you can perform ETL (extract, transform, load) operations without using any code. Azure Synapse provides enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics.

Azure data factory is a data integration service that allows user to create workflows for moving data and transforming it. Azure synapse, however, will provide additional services like notebooks, SQL scripts, store tables etc. All these functionalities help to ingest, prepare, manage, and analyze data using Power BI or Machine learning.

If you want to use Azure data factory to ingest data, you need to use either azure synapse or Power BI to analyze your data and build reports. But using Azure synapse is a much better choice because it has an integrated Power BI service which allows you to build reports or datasets within the Synapse studio. Hence it would be a better choice to use Azure Synapse instead of Azure data factory or a combination of both.

To understand more about the differences between azure synapse and azure data factory, refer to the following link.

https://azurelessons.com/azure-synapse-analytics-vs-azure-data-factory/

The following link provides an insight about how to use azure synapse studio to work on Power BI.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/get-started-visualize-power-bi