James works at Microsoft as a big data and data warehousing solution architect where he has been for most of the last ten years. Before that he was an independent consultant working as a Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence architect and developer. He is a prior SQL Server MVP with over 35 years of IT experience. Check out his book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh.
For a long time clients would ask me how to determine the cost savings by migrating their applications and databases to Azure. I never had a good answer until now: The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator. Now in preview, just … Continue reading →
Azure Advisor is a really cool personalized recommendation engine that provides you with proactive best practices guidance on High Availability, Security, Performance and Cost when using Azure. It is in public preview. Learn more about Azure Advisor here. Azure Advisor … Continue reading →
Microsoft has a new release for the Analytics Platform System (APS). This appliance update is called APS 2016 and has been released to manufacturing and is now generally available (it’s also called AU6). APS is Microsoft’s scale-out Massively Parallel Processing … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements. Next up is the PolyBase enhancements. PolyBase is a technology that accesses and combines both … Continue reading →
Microsoft Connect(); is a developer event from Nov 16-18, where plenty of announcements are made. Here is a summary of the data platform related announcements: Azure Data Lake Analytics is generally available in two datacenters in US (EMEA coming in Feb). … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements. Next up is the Microsoft Professional Program for Big Data. A few months back, … Continue reading →
With Windows Server 2016 just been released, now is the perfect time to build an Azure VM with SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016. In a matter of minutes you can be playing and learning both platforms. Below I will … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements. Next up is the free trial of Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW). Azure … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements. Next up is the technical Preview for Power BI reports on-prem in SSRS. The … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. I’m writing a set of blogs covering the major announcements. Perhaps the biggest one is the introduction of the Azure Analysis Services Public Preview (OLAP). … Continue reading →
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. My next few blogs will cover the major announcements. This first one is about the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) tool v 2.0 general availability and … Continue reading →
Microsoft Data Warehouse Fast Track for SQL Server 2016 is a joint effort between Microsoft and its hardware partners to deliver validated, pre-configured solutions that reduce the complexity of implementing a data warehouse on SQL Server Enterprise Edition. The Data … Continue reading →
A recent Microsoft blog post announced that they are releasing five new Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) and Developer (MCSD) specialties. These credentials are aligned to Centers of Excellence, used by the Microsoft Partner Network to identify technical competencies that are … Continue reading →
Cortana Intelligence Solutions is a new tool just released in public preview that enables users to rapidly discover, easily provision, quickly experiment with, and jumpstart production grade analytical solutions using the Cortana Intelligence Suite (CIS). It does so using preconfigured solutions, reference … Continue reading →
In my role as a Data Platform Solution Architect (DPSA) at Microsoft, part of my responsibility is to keep up with all the Microsoft on-prem and cloud data-related technology and trends, as well as non-Microsoft technology and trends in areas such … Continue reading →
One thing I try to do in my role with Microsoft is to get clients to think of possible use cases for building solutions in the Azure cloud. To set off light bulbs in their heads. Sometimes this is accomplished … Continue reading →
SQL Server 2016 introduces a very cool new feature called real-time operational analytics, which is the ability to run both analytics (OLAP) and OLTP workloads on the same database tables at the same time. This allows you to eliminate the need … Continue reading →
A new performance level for Azure SQL Database was recently announced, called P15. This new offering is more than two times more powerful than the next best offering, P11. P15 offers 4000 database transaction units (DTU) where P11 offered 1750 … Continue reading →
(updated 8/15/2019) I am sometimes asked to compare Azure SQL Database (SQL DB) to Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW). The most important thing to remember is SQL DB is for OLTP (i.e. applications with individual updates, inserts, and deletes) and … Continue reading →
Lambda architecture is a data-processing architecture designed to handle massive quantities of data (i.e. “Big Data”) by using both batch-processing and stream-processing methods. This idea is to balance latency, throughput, scaling, and fault-tolerance by using batch processing to provide comprehensive and accurate … Continue reading →