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Microsoft certification changes
A recent Microsoft blog post announced that they are releasing five new Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) and Developer (MCSD) specialties. These credentials are aligned to Centers of...
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Data Warehouse Fast Track for SQL Server 2016
Microsoft Data Warehouse Fast Track for SQL Server 2016 is a joint effort between Microsoft and its hardware partners to deliver validated, pre-configured solutions that reduce the complexity of...
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PASS Summit Announcements: DMA/DEA
Microsoft usually has some interesting announcements at the PASS Summit, and this year was no exception. My next few blogs will cover the major announcements. This first one is about the Data...
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PASS Summit Announcements: Azure Analysis Services
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. Perhaps the biggest one is the...
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PASS Summit Announcements: Power BI reports on-prem in SSRS
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 technical Preview...
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PASS Summit Announcements: SQL DW free trial
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...
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Azure SQL Server 2016 VM
With Windows Server 2016 just been released, now is the perfect time to build an Azure VM with SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016. In a matter of minutes you can be playing and learning both...
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PASS Summit Announcements: Microsoft Professional Program for Big Data
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...
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Microsoft Connect(); announcements
Microsoft Connect(); is a developer event from Nov 16-18, where plenty of announcements are made. Here is a summary of the data platform related announcements: Azure Data Lake Analytics is generally...
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PASS Summit Announcements: PolyBase enhancements
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 PolyBase...
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Analytics Platform System 2016 Release
Microsoft has a new release for the Analytics Platform System (APS). This appliance update is called APS 2016 and has been released to manufacturing and is now generally available. APS is Microsoft’s...
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Azure Advisor
Azure Advisor is a really cool personalized recommendation engine that provides you with proactive best practices guidance on High Availability, Security, Performance and Cost when using Azure. It is...
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Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator
For a long time clients would ask me how to determine the cost savings by migrating their applications and databases to Azure. I never had a good answer until now: The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)...
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What is HTAP?
I have been seeing the term “HTAP” mentioned a lot recently, and I thought I would briefly explain the term. HTAP stands for Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing. HTAP is used to describe...
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Data gateway confusion
Microsoft has created data gateways as a way that cloud products such as Power BI and Azure Machine Learning can access on-prem data, often called a hybrid model. This is most useful for companies...
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Create quick queries quickly with SSAS in Azure
In a perfect world a data warehouse would always return all queries very quickly, no matter what the size or complexity of the data warehouse. But the reality is that sometimes we won’t get the...
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Microsoft Products vs Hadoop/OSS Products
Microsoft’s end goal is for Azure to become the best cloud platform for customers to run their data workloads. This means Microsoft will provide customers the best environment to run their big...
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IoT Hub vs. Event Hub
There can sometimes be confusion, in IoT scenarios, between IoT Hub and Event Hub, as they can both be valid choices for streaming data ingestion. My Microsoft colleague, Steve Busby, an IoT...
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Azure Data Factory and SSIS compared
I see a lot of confusion when it comes to Azure Data Factory (ADF) and how it compares to SSIS. It is not simply “SSIS in the cloud”. See What is Azure Data Factory? for an overview of ADF, and I’ll...
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Power BI and Excel options for Hadoop
Below I have attempted to list the various options for reporting off of Hadoop (HDInsight, HDP, Cloudera) using Power BI Desktop and Excel. Some of the data sources prompt you to choose the Data...
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