Azure Data Factory v2 (ADF) has a new feature in public preview called Data Flow. I have usually described ADF as an orchestration tool instead of an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tool since it has the “E” and “L” in ETL but … Continue reading →
With data lakes becoming very popular, a common question I have been hearing often from customers is, “Should I load structured/relational data into my data lake?”. I talked about this a while back in my blog post What is a data … Continue reading →
As a follow-up to my blog Azure Archive Blob Storage, Microsoft has released another storage tier called Azure Premium Blob Storage (announcement). It is in private preview in US East 2, US Central and US West regions. This is a performance … Continue reading →
At the Microsoft Ignite conference, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2019 is now in preview and that SQL Server 2019 will include Apache Spark and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for scalable compute and storage. This new architecture that combines together the … Continue reading →
At Microsoft Ignite, one of the announcements was for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which was made available in public preview October 1st, 2018 in 12 different Azure regions. SQL Database Hyperscale is a new SQL-based and highly scalable service tier for single databases … Continue reading →
As I first mentioned in my blog Microsoft database migration tools, the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) is a PaaS solution that makes it easy to migrate from on-prem/RDS to Azure and one database type to another. I’ll give a brief overview … Continue reading →
Read Scale-Out is a little-known feature that allows you to load balance Azure SQL Database read-only workloads using the capacity of read-only replicas, for free. As mentioned in my blog Azure SQL Database high availability, each database in the Premium tier (DTU-based … Continue reading →
My last blog post was on Azure SQL Database high availability and I would like to continue along that discussion with a blog post about disaster recovery in Azure SQL Database. First, a clarification on the difference between high availability and … Continue reading →
In this blog I want to talk about how Azure SQL Database achieves high availability. One of the major benefits from moving from on-prem SQL Server to Azure SQL Database is how much easier it is to have high availability … Continue reading →
Dataflows, previously called Common Data Service for Analytics as well as Datapools, will be in preview soon and I wanted to explain in this blog what it is and how it can help you get value out of your data … Continue reading →
There are two really great features just added to Power BI that I wanted to blog about: Composite models and Dual storage mode. This is part of the July release for Power BI Desktop and it is in preview (see … Continue reading →
I have heard some people say if you have a data warehouse, there is no need for cubes (when I say “cubes” I am referring to tabular and multidimensional OLAP models). And I have heard others say if you have OLAP … Continue reading →
There are a number of options to monitor Azure SQL Database. In this post I will briefly cover the built-in options and not 3rd-party products that I blogged about a while back (see Azure SQL Database monitoring). Monitoring keeps you alert … Continue reading →
Big news! The next generation of Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) has arrived. See the official announcement. In short, ADLS Gen2 is the combination of the current ADLS (now called Gen1) and Blob storage. Gen2 is built on Blob storage. By … Continue reading →
The Analytics Platform System (APS), which is a renaming of the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), has just released an appliance update (AU7), which is sort of like a service pack, except that it includes many new features. Below is what is new in this release: Customers … Continue reading →
Cosmos DB is an awesome product that is mainly used for large-scale OLTP solutions. Any web, mobile, gaming, and IoT application that needs to handle massive amounts of data, reads, and writes at a globally distributed scale with near-real response times for … Continue reading →
There are times when you need to create a “quick and dirty” solution to build a report. This blog will show you one way of using a few Azure products to accomplish that. This should not be viewed as a … Continue reading →
Another Microsoft event and another bunch of exciting announcements. At the Microsoft Build event this week, the major announcements in the data platform space were: Multi-master at global scale with Azure Cosmos DB. Perform writes on containers of data (for example, collections, … Continue reading →
Monday was announced the general availability of the Compute Optimized Gen2 tier of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. With this performance optimized tier, Microsoft is dramatically accelerating query performance and concurrency. The changes in Azure SQL DW Compute Optimized Gen2 tier are: 5x query … Continue reading →
In this podcast I talk with Carlos Chacon of SQL Data Partners on big data solutions in the cloud. Here is the description of the chat: Big Data. Do you have big data? What does that even mean? In this episode … Continue reading →