Azure IoT Central
This is a short blog to give you a high-level overview on a product called Azure IoT Central. I saw this fairly new Azure product (GA Sept 2018) in use for the first time at a large manufacturing company who … Continue reading →
Azure Synapse and Delta Lake
Many companies are seeing the value in collecting data to help them make better business decisions. When building a solution in Azure to collect the data, nearly everyone is using a data lake. A majority of those are also using … Continue reading →
Data Lakehouse, Data Mesh, and Data Fabric
(NOTE: I have returned to Microsoft and am working as a Solution Architect in Microsoft Industry Solutions, formally known as Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS), where I help customers build solutions on Azure. Contact your Microsoft account executive for more info. … Continue reading →
Microsoft industry clouds
In talking with Microsoft customers, I have found that most are not aware that Microsoft has created industry clouds (see Microsoft Industry Clouds). So I wanted to use this blog to briefly explain what they are and how they may … Continue reading →
Distributed SQL
A very brief history of databases for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads starts with relational databases (RDBMS), which worked well for many years. With the advent of the internet and the need for millions of transactions per second, NoSQL filled that … Continue reading →
Azure Synapse Analytics November updates
Microsoft recently came out with a blog on a bunch of new features available for Azure Synapse Analytics (see Azure Synapse Analytics November 2021 Update), and I wanted to point out my top ten personal favorites: Synapse Data Explorer now … Continue reading →
Azure Synapse Analytics database templates
One of the biggest announcements at Microsoft Ignite that seemed to be overlooked by a lot of people was Azure Synapse Analytics database templates, now in public preview. I wanted to dive into it a bit in this blog because … Continue reading →
Microsoft Ignite Announcements Nov 2021
Microsoft Ignite has always announced many new products and new product features, and this year was no exception. Many exciting announcements, and below I list the major data platform and AI related announcements: SQL Server 2022: A new version of SQL … Continue reading →
Azure Purview is generally available
After a very long public preview (9 months), Azure Purview is finally generally available (GA). I described Purview in a previous blog (New Microsoft data governance product: Azure Purview). In short, Purview’s main purpose is to collect metadata from various … Continue reading →
Data Platform products for Microsoft gaps
Microsoft has a ton of data platform-related products, but there are certain areas where they either don’t have a product or what they have is limited and you need to look at a 3rd-party product to fill that gap. At … Continue reading →
Single-cloud versus Multi-cloud
A discussion I have seen many companies have is if they should be single-cloud (using only one cloud company) or multi-cloud (using more than one cloud company). The three major Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that companies use for nearly all … Continue reading →
Podcast and presentation decks on data architectures
Tomorrow (Tuesday (8/10/21) I will be on a podcast for SaxonGlobal called “The Alphabet Soup of Data Architectures” where I will talk about the modern data warehouse, data fabric, data lakehouse, data mesh, and more. I hope you can check … Continue reading →
Data Mesh: Centralized ownership vs decentralized ownership
I have done a ton of research lately on Data Mesh (see the excellent Building a successful Data Mesh – More than just a technology initiative for more details), and have some concerns about the paradigm shift it requires. My … Continue reading →
Data Mesh: Centralized vs decentralized data architecture
One of the biggest differences between the Data Mesh and other data platform architectures is a data mesh is a highly decentralized distributed data architecture as opposed to a centralized monolithic data architecture based on a data warehouse and/or a … Continue reading →
Data Fabric defined
Another buzzword that you may have been hearing a lot about lately is Data Fabric. In short, a data fabric is a single environment consisting of a unified architecture with services and technologies running on it that architecture that helps … Continue reading →
What’s new with Power BI?
At the Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2021, a ton of new features for Power BI where announced. Below is my list of top ten new features, but there were plenty more. For a list of all the announcements, see Microsoft … Continue reading →
Modern Data Warehouse explained
I created a short YouTube video (20 minutes) that is a whiteboarding session that describes the five stages (ingest, store, transform, model, visualize) that make up a modern data warehouse (MDW) and the Azure products that you can use for … Continue reading →
Modern Data Warehouse & Reverse ETL
An extension to the Modern Data Warehouse (MDW) that I have heard a bit about lately is called “Reverse ETL”. Before I describe what that is, first I wanted to give a quick review of a typical MDW, which consists … Continue reading →
A new WordPress theme and a new job
As you can tell, I have switched to a new WordPress theme for this blog site. I have now been blogging for ten years! It seemed like a good time to finally make a change 
Speaking of which, I … Continue reading →
Microsoft Ignite Announcements 2021
Microsoft Ignite has always announced many new products and new product features, and this year was no exception. Many exciting announcements, and below I list the major data platform and AI related announcements: Azure Arc enabled machine learning (preview): Build models … Continue reading →