Azure Synapse Analytics has served a lot of data teams well. But over the past two years, the conversation in most of our client meetings has shifted. Microsoft Fabric has matured into a compelling unified analytics platform. Databricks on Azure keeps setting the bar for lakehouse and AI workloads. For many teams, the question is no longer whether Synapse is still fit for purpose, but whether there is a better home for the next five years of their data platform.
Once that decision is on the table, the real work begins.
Meet Max Porter, the migration agent we built to take the drama out of the move.
Why Synapse migrations stall
Most teams we speak to are not stuck on the what. They have a reasonable sense of where they want to go. They stall on the how, because the work in between is brutal.
Someone has to inventory every pipeline, every SQL pool, every notebook, every linked service, every report downstream. Someone has to decide which objects are still in use, which are zombies, and which are load-bearing but undocumented. Then someone has to rewrite transformation logic, re-point hundreds of connections, validate that the new numbers match the old numbers down to the cent, and do all of this without freezing the business for months.
A typical Synapse estate has thousands of objects. A typical data team has five people. The math does not work, and this is why migrations keep getting pushed to the next quarter even when the business case is clear.
What Max Porter does
Max Porter is an AI migration agent we built to handle the industrial part of that work, so our engineers and yours can focus on the decisions that actually need a human.
Max works through the full migration lifecycle, with quality gates at every handoff:
- Analyze
Max reads your entire Synapse estate: pipelines, dedicated and serverless SQL pools, Spark notebooks, linked services, datasets, and downstream dependencies. You get a full inventory with usage patterns, complexity scoring, and a recommendation on what to migrate, what to retire, and what to refactor.
- Architect
Based on your target (Microsoft Fabric or Databricks on Azure), Max proposes a landing architecture that maps your current workloads to the right constructs: lakehouses, warehouses, pipelines, jobs, Unity Catalog, or OneLake. You get a concrete design document, not a vague slide.
- Build
Max generates the target artefacts: notebooks, pipelines, SQL objects, configuration, and infrastructure-as-code. These are real, reviewable outputs that your team (and ours) can inspect, adjust, and own.
- Migrate and validate
Max moves the data and runs quality gates that compare outputs on the source and target: row counts, aggregate checks, schema conformity, and performance baselines. You know the new platform is telling you the same truth as the old one before you cut over.
Nothing about Max replaces judgement. It replaces the weeks of repetitive work that sit between the decision to migrate and the day the migration is done.
Why we built it this way
We built Max Porter because we kept seeing the same pattern in client engagements. The first few weeks of any Synapse migration were spent on discovery and cataloguing that was mostly mechanical. The middle months were spent on translation work that followed consistent patterns. The last stretch, validation, was tedious but critical.
Automating those parts does two things. It shortens the overall migration significantly, which means you start getting value from the new platform while the business case is still fresh. And it raises the quality of the work, because a machine doing 10,000 comparisons is more patient than a human doing 10,000 comparisons at 4pm on a Friday.
What stays human is the strategy: which workloads to modernize rather than lift-and-shift, how to redesign for the target platform’s strengths, how to sequence the cutover around your business calendar, how to retrain your team. That is where our architects spend their time now, instead of on the work Max handles.
What this looks like as an engagement
Max Porter is not something you install. It is how we deliver migration work for you. An engagement typically starts with an assessment where Max produces a complete picture of your Synapse estate and a migration plan you can take to your board. From there, we move into design and build with quality gates you sign off on at every stage.
The target platform is your call. We work with both Microsoft Fabric and Databricks on Azure, and a growing part of the conversation is helping clients decide which fits their roadmap, their team, and their wider Microsoft or open-source preferences.
Beyond Synapse
We named him Max Porter for a reason. Synapse-to-Fabric and Synapse-to-Databricks are where he started, but migration is migration. The patterns that make Max effective (structured analysis, architecture-aware translation, quality-gated validation) apply to many other ports that data teams are quietly weighing up.
If you are starting to look seriously at Fabric or Databricks and wondering what a pragmatic path off Synapse would look like, we would be glad to walk you through it.
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Contact Lorenz
Domain Lead Data & AI