A challenge I have with customers who want to get hands-on experience with the Azure products that are found in a modern data warehouse architecture is finding a workshop that covers many of those products. To the rescue is a … Continue reading →
If you are building a big data solution in the cloud, you will likely be landing most of the source data into a data lake. And much of this data will need to be transformed (i.e. cleaned and joined together … 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 →
The Azure Data Architecture Guide has just been released! Check it out: http://aka.ms/ADAG Think of it as a menu or syllabus for data professionals. What service should you use, why, and when would you use it. I had a small involvement … 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 →
Over the last few years I have been involved in reviewing the architectures of various companies that are building or have built big data solutions. When I say “big data”, I’m referring to the incorporation of semi-structured data such as sensor … Continue reading →
Polyglot Persistence is a fancy term to mean that when storing data, it is best to use multiple data storage technologies, chosen based upon the way data is being used by individual applications or components of a single application. Different kinds … Continue reading →
Massive parallel processing (MPP) is the future for data warehousing. So what is MPP? SQL Server is a Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) solution, which essentially means it uses one server. MPP provides scalability and query performance by running independent servers in parallel. That … 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 →
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 →