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.
SQL Server 2016 was recently announced. Top new features include: Always Encrypted protects data at rest and in motion. With Always Encrypted, SQL Server can perform operations on encrypted data and best of all, the encryption key resides with the … Continue reading →
At the recent Microsoft Build Developer Conference, Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie announced the Azure Data Lake. It is a new flavor of Azure Storage which can handle streaming data (low latency, high volume, short updates), is geo-distributed, data-locality aware and … Continue reading →
Analytics Platform System (APS) is Microsoft’s massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse technology. This has only been available as an on-prem solution (see video Overview of Microsoft Analytics Platform System). Until now. At the recent Microsoft Build Developer Conference, Executive Vice … Continue reading →
In case you were wondering what happened to the TechEd conferences, Microsoft is now bringing together the best of previously individual events – the Management Summit, the Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and TechEd conferences – and then taking it to … Continue reading →
A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. NoSQL is often interpreted as Not-only-SQL to emphasize that they may also support SQL-like … Continue reading →
A “data lake” is a storage repository, usually in Hadoop, that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed. It’s a great place for investigating, exploring, experimenting, and refining data, in addition to archiving … Continue reading →
Microsoft Azure provides you two options when hosting your SQL Server-based data warehouse: Microsoft Azure SQL Database and SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machine. Which one is appropriate based on the size of the data warehouse? What are some hardware features to … Continue reading →
I see a lot of confusion on what exactly is an Operational Data Store (ODS). While it can mean different things to different people, I’ll explain what I see as the most common definition. First let me mention that an … Continue reading →
Thanks to everyone who attended my session “Building a Big Data Solution” (Building an Effective Data Warehouse Architecture with Hadoop, Cloud and MPP) for Pragmatic Works today. The abstract for my session is below and the recording will be available here tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed it! … Continue reading →
In an effort to understand Power BI and all the products it encompasses, I have made this slide deck to hopefully make things easy for you: Power BI Made Simple. It is a presentation that covers all the products under the Power … Continue reading →
Advanced Analytics, or Business Analytics, refers to future-oriented analysis that can be used to help drive changes and improvements in business practices. It is made up of four phases: Descriptive Analytics: What is generally referred to as “business intelligence”, this … Continue reading →
Ever wonder about Microsoft’s product roadmap? With Microsoft rapidly releases products and services, they realized the need to provide better transparency. Well wonder no more! They have released the Cloud Platform Roadmap Site (visit here). Roadmaps are given for: Microsoft … Continue reading →
Long has the question been asked “Which Microsoft tool do I use for dashboards?”. SSRS, Excel, PowerView, Report Builder and PerformancePoint are all candidates. But that has all changed, and the future of dashboarding is here: Power BI Designer [since renamed … Continue reading →
The following blog describes how to use certain cloud-based Power BI for Office 365 products (Power View and Q&A) on a Power BI Site that will reference data on-premises. To do this you will use certain on-premise Power BI products … Continue reading →
The Analytics Platform System (APS), which is a renaming of the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), has just released an appliance update (AU3), which is sort of like a service pack, except that it includes many new features. These appliance updates are made available frequently, … Continue reading →
The traditional data warehouse has served us well for many years, but new trends are causing it to break in four different ways: data growth, fast query expectations from users, non-relational/unstructured data, and cloud-born data. How can you prevent this … Continue reading →
The Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a service designed to allow developers to integrate disparate data sources. It is a platform somewhat like SSIS in the cloud to manage the data you have both on-prem and in the cloud. It … Continue reading →
I have previously blogged about the Fast Track Data Warehouse, a reference configuration optimized for data warehousing (see Microsoft SQL Server Reference Architecture and Appliances). That was version 3.0 of the reference configuration that was for SQL Server 2008 R2. Released a couple … Continue reading →
Should you move your data to the cloud? That is the question. The answer is not simple. While moving data to the cloud is all the rage, the fact is a large majority of the Fortune 500 companies are not … Continue reading →
I was fortunate to be a technical reviewer for a new book, SQL Server 2014 Business Intelligence Development by Reza Rad. Below is the abstract. It’s a great book for those of you trying to learn about all the various … Continue reading →