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 →
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 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 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 →
I sometimes get asked from customers if they should use a star schema or should they use one large single table/flatfile for their dataset in Power BI. The answer is almost always star schema, and Patrick LeBlanc does a great … Continue reading →
The two latest trends in emerging data platform architectures are the Data Lakehouse (the subject of my last blog Data Lakehouse defined), and the Data Mesh, the subject of this blog. Data Mesh was first introduced by ThoughtWorks via the … Continue reading →
As a follow-up to my blog Data Lakehouse & Synapse, I wanted to talk about the various definitions I am seeing about what a data lakehouse is, including a recent paper by Databricks. Databricks uses the term “Lakehouse” in their … Continue reading →
There are various ways to keep SQL Server databases and SQL Database/SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) databases in-sync asynchronously that I will discuss in this blog. The main use cases for syncing databases are to distribute reads (i.e. a second … Continue reading →
Announced last week is a major new feature for Power BI: you can now use DirectQuery to connect to Azure Analysis Services or Power BI Datasets and combine it with other DirectQuery datasets and/or imported datasets. This is a HUGE … Continue reading →
