I am starting to see this relatively new phrase, “Data Lakehouse”, being used in the data platform world. It’s the combination of “Data Lake” and “Data Warehouse”. In this post I’ll give my thoughts on it, and how the next … Continue reading →
The new SQL on-demand (to be renamed SQL serverless) offering within Azure Synapse Analytics opens up a whole new world of getting insights into data immediately, at low-cost, using familiar tools/languages. There is no infrastructure to setup or clusters to … Continue reading →
A few data platform announcements yesterday at Microsoft Build that I wanted to blog about. The biggest one is Azure Synapse Analytics is now available in public preview! You can immediately log into your Azure portal and use it. While … Continue reading →
I see a lot of confusion among many people on what features are available today in Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse) and what features are coming in the future. Below is a picture (click to zoom) … Continue reading →
As a follow-up to my last blog, Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI performance, I wanted to focus on concurrency when using these two products. A common question I here from customers is because of the performance of Azure Synapse … Continue reading →
With two new relational database features (Result-set caching and Materialized Views) just GA’d in Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse), it makes for some very compelling reporting performance options when combined with Power BI. In this blog I’ll … Continue reading →
Almost lost in all the announcements from Ignite was a bunch of amazing new features that were added to the Provisioned Resources/SQL Pool section (read SQLDW functionalities) side of Azure Synapse Analytics (formally called Azure SQL Data Warehouse). Here is … Continue reading →
As a follow-up to my blogs What product to use to transform my data? and Should I load structured data into my data lake?, I wanted to talk about where you should you clean your data when building a modern data warehouse … 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 →
There are a tremendous amount of Microsoft products that are cloud-based for building big data solutions. It’s great that there are so many products to choose from, but it does lead to confusion on what are the best products to … Continue reading →
With so many product options to choose from for building a big data solution in the cloud, such as SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW), Azure Analysis Services (AAS), SQL Database (SQL DB), and Azure Data Lake (ADL), there are various combinations … 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 →
(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 →
For companies that sell an on-prem software solution and are looking to move that solution to the cloud, a challenge arises on how to architect that solution in the cloud. For example, say you have a software solution that stores … Continue reading →
The Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW), that I blogged about here, is now generally available. Here is the official announcement. In brief, SQL DW is a fully managed data-warehouse-as-a-service that you can provision in minutes and scale up in seconds. … Continue reading →
The pricing for Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW) consists of a compute charge and a storage charge. For compute, it is not based on hardware configuration but rather by data warehouse units (DWU). DWU can be scaled up or down via … Continue reading →
Azure SQL Data Warehouse (SQL DW) is a new platform-as-a service (PaaS) that distributes workloads across multiple compute resources, called massively parallel processing (MPP). Loading data into a MPP data warehouse requires a different approach, or mindset, than traditional methods of loading data into … Continue reading →
(updated 10/28/20). Life we be so much easier if we could just trust everyone, but since we can’t we need solid security for our databases. Azure SQL Database and Azure Synapse Analytics have many security features to make you sleep … Continue reading →
Previously I covered what a data lake is (including the Azure Data Lake and enhancements), and now I wanted to touch on the main reason why you might want to incorporate a data lake into your overall data warehouse solution. To … Continue reading →
In a previous blog I talked about copying on-prem data to Azure Blob Storage (Getting data into Azure Blob Storage). Let’s say you have copied the data and it is sitting in Azure Blob Storage (or an Azure Data Lake) … Continue reading →