Microsoft Fabric and OneLake Azure Lakehouse vs Databricks and Snowflake Cloud
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What is Microsoft Fabric for Azure Cloud (Beyond the Buzz) and how it Competes with Snowflake and Databricks

If you ask your favorite large language model, Microsoft Fabric appears to be the ultimate solution for any data challenge you can imagine. That’s also the impression many people get from Microsoft’s sales teams. But is it really the silver bullet it’s made out to be? This article takes a closer look exploring the glossy marketing and sales definition of the platform and then deconstructing it from a more practical perspective. Learn what Microsoft Fabric is truly built for, and how it fits into the wider data landscape, especially in comparison to other major players in the data analytics market like Databricks and Snowflake.
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The Shift Left Architecture
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The Shift Left Architecture – From Batch and Lakehouse to Real-Time Data Products with Data Streaming

Data integration is a hard challenge in every enterprise. Batch processing and Reverse ETL are common practices in a data warehouse, data lake or lakehouse. Data inconsistency, high compute cost, and stale information are the consequences. This blog post introduces a new design pattern to solve these problems: The Shift Left Architecture enables a data mesh with real-time data products to unify transactional and analytical workloads with Apache Kafka, Flink and Iceberg. Consistent information is handled with streaming processing or ingested into Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, or any other analytics / AI platform to increase flexibility, reduce cost and enable a data-driven company culture with faster time-to-market building innovative software applications.
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Apache Kafka and Snowflake Cost Efficiency and Data Governance
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Apache Kafka + Flink + Snowflake: Cost Efficient Analytics and Data Governance

Snowflake is a leading cloud data warehouse and transitions into a data cloud that enables various use cases. The major drawback of this evolution is the significantly growing cost of the data processing. This blog post explores how data streaming with Apache Kafka and Apache Flink enables a “shift left architecture” where business teams can reduce cost, provide better data quality, and process data more efficiently. The real-time capabilities and unification of transactional and analytical workloads using Apache Iceberg’s open table format enable new use cases and a best of breed approach without a vendor lock-in and the choice of various analytical query engines like Dremio, Starburst, Databricks, Amazon Athena, Google BigQuery, or Apache Flink.
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Snowflake with Apache Kafka and Iceberg Connector
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Snowflake Data Integration Options for Apache Kafka (including Iceberg)

The integration between Apache Kafka and Snowflake is often cumbersome. Options include near real-time ingestion with a Kafka Connect connector, batch ingestion from large files, or leveraging a standard table format like Apache Iceberg. This blog post explores the alternatives and discusses its trade-offs. The end shows how data streaming helps with hybrid architectures where data needs to be ingested from the private data center into Snowflake in the public cloud.
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Snowflake and Apache Kafka Data Integration Anti Patterns Zero Reverse ETL
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Snowflake Integration Patterns: Zero ETL and Reverse ETL vs. Apache Kafka

Snowflake is a leading cloud-native data warehouse. Integration patterns include batch data integration, Zero ETL and near real-time data ingestion with Apache Kafka. This blog post explores the different approaches and discovers its trade-offs. Following industry recommendations, it is suggested to avoid anti-patterns like Reverse ETL and instead use data streaming to enhance the flexibility, scalability, and maintainability of enterprise architecture.
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Data Warehouse and Data Lake Modernization with Data Streaming
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Data Warehouse and Data Lake Modernization: From Legacy On-Premise to Cloud-Native Infrastructure

The concepts and architectures of a data warehouse, a data lake, and data streaming are complementary to solving business problems. Unfortunately, the underlying technologies are often misunderstood, overused for monolithic and inflexible architectures, and pitched for wrong use cases by vendors. Let’s explore this dilemma in a blog series. This is part 3: Data Warehouse Modernization: From Legacy On-Premise to Cloud-Native Infrastructure.
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Reverse ETL Anti Pattern vs Event Streaming with Apache Kafka
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When to Use Reverse ETL and when it is an Anti-Pattern

This blog post explores why software vendors (try to) introduce new solutions for Reverse ETL, when Reverse ETL is really needed, and how it fits into the enterprise architecture. The involvement of event streaming to process data in motion is a key piece of Reverse ETL for real-time use cases.
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