Category: Polybase

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. 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 in Azure.  As an example, let’s say I have an on-prem SQL Server database and I want to copy one million rows from a few tables to a data lake (ADLS Gen2) and then to Azure SQL DW, where the data will be used to generate Power BI reports (for background on a ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. 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 – the “T” in ETL).  Since the data lake is just storage (i.e. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 or Azure Blob Storage), you need to pick a product that will be the compute and will do the transformation of the data.  There is good news and bad news when it comes to which ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. With data lakes becoming very popular, a common question I have been hearing often from customers is, “Should I load structured/relational data into my data lake?”.  I talked about this a while back in my blog post What is a data lake? and will expand on it in this blog.  Melissa Coates also talked about this recently, and I used her graphic below to illustrate: I would not say it’s common place to load structured data into the data lake, but I do see it frequently. In most cases it is not necessary to first ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. 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 SQL Server database engine, Spark, and HDFS into a unified data platform is called a “big data cluster”, deployed as containers on Kubernetes.  Big data clusters can be deployed in any cloud where there is a managed Kubernetes service, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), or in on-premises Kubernetes clusters, such as AKS on ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. I have blogged about Data Virtualization vs Data Warehouse and wanted to blog on a similar topic: Data Virtualization vs. Data Movement. Data virtualization integrates data from disparate sources, locations and formats, without replicating or moving the data, to create a single “virtual” data layer that delivers unified data services to support multiple applications and users. Data movement is the process of extracting data from source systems and bringing it into the data warehouse and is commonly called ETL, which stands for extraction, transformation, and loading. If you are building a data warehouse, should you ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. There have been a number of enhancements to Hadoop recently when it comes to fast interactive querying with such products as Hive LLAP and Spark SQL which are being used over slower interactive querying options such as Tez/Yarn and batch processing options such as MapReduce (see Azure HDInsight Performance Benchmarking: Interactive Query, Spark and Presto). This has led to a question I have started to see from customers: Do I still need a data warehouse or can I just put everything in a data lake and report off of that using Hive LLAP or Spark ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. Better late than never: The Analytics Platform System (APS), which is a renaming of the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), released an appliance update (AU6) about a year ago, and I missed the announcement.  Below is what is new in this release, also called APS 2016.  APS is alive and well and there will be another AU next calendar year: Microsoft is pleased to announce that the appliance update, Analytics Platform System (APS) 2016, has been released to manufacturing and is now generally available.  APS is Microsoft’s scale-out Massively Parallel Processing fully integrated system for data warehouse ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. Data virtualization goes by a lot of different names: logical data warehouse, data federation, virtual database, and decentralized data warehouse.  Data virtualization allows you to integrate data from various sources, keeping the data in-place, so that you can generate reports and dashboards to create business value from the data.  It is an alternative to building a data warehouse, where you collect data from various sources and store a copy of the data in a new data store. The main advantage of data virtualization is speed-to-market, where we can build a solution in a ... Read More

Feed: Henk's tech blog. Author: Henk. With the release of CTP3 SQL Server 2016 and its native In-database support for the open source R language you can now call both R, RevoScaleR functions and scripts directly from within a SQL query and benefit from multi-threaded and multi-core in-DB computations. Yet another SQLServer milestone! The R integration brings a lot of benefits and new scenarios to your end users; it brings the utility of data science to your applications without the need to ‘export’ the data to your R environment! Installing & Enabling SQLR integration To get started you will need ... Read More

Feed: James Serra's Blog. Author: James Serra. 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 of using the products, each with pros/cons along with differences in cost.  With many customers looking at using SQL DW, I wanted to mention various reference architectures that I have seen, ordered by most cost to lowest cost: Do staging, data refinement and reporting all from SQL DW.  You can scale compute power ... Read More