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Podcast: Myths of Modern Data Management
As part of the Secrets of Data Analytics Leaders by the Eckerson Group, I did a 30-minute podcast with Wayne Eckerson where I discussed myths of modern data management. Some of the myths discussed...
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Cost savings of the cloud
I often hear people say moving to the cloud does not save money, but frequently they don’t take into account the savings for indirect costs that are hard to measure (or the benefits you get that are...
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Podcast: Big Data Solutions in the Cloud
In this podcast I talk with Carlos Chacon of SQL Data Partners on big data solutions in the cloud. Here is the description of the chat: Big Data. Do you have big data? What does that even mean? In...
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Azure SQL Data Warehouse Gen2 announced
Monday was announced the general availability of the Compute Optimized Gen2 tier of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. With this performance optimized tier, Microsoft is dramatically accelerating query...
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Microsoft Build event announcements
Another Microsoft event and another bunch of exciting announcements. At the Microsoft Build event this week, the major announcements in the data platform space were: Multi-master at global scale with...
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Getting value out of data quickly
There are times when you need to create a “quick and dirty” solution to build a report. This blog will show you one way of using a few Azure products to accomplish that. This should not be viewed as...
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Understanding Cosmos DB
Cosmos DB is an awesome product that is mainly used for large-scale OLTP solutions. Any web, mobile, gaming, and IoT application that needs to handle massive amounts of data, reads, and writes at a...
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Analytics Platform System (APS) AU7 released
The Analytics Platform System (APS), which is a renaming of the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), has just released an appliance update (AU7), which is sort of like a service pack, except that it includes...
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Azure Data Lake Store Gen2
Big news! The next generation of Azure Data Lake Store (ADLS) has arrived. See the official announcement. In short, ADLS Gen2 is the combination of the current ADLS (now called Gen1) and Blob...
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Monitoring Azure SQL Database
There are a number of options to monitor Azure SQL Database. In this post I will briefly cover the built-in options and not 3rd-party products that I blogged about a while back (see Azure SQL Database...
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The need for having both a DW and cubes
I have heard some people say if you have a data warehouse, there is no need for cubes (when I say “cubes” I am referring to tabular and multidimensional OLAP models). And I have heard others say if...
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Power BI new feature: Composite models
There are two really great features just added to Power BI that I wanted to blog about: Composite models and Dual storage mode. This is part of the July release for Power BI Desktop and it is in...
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Power BI: Dataflows
Dataflows, previously called Common Data Service for Analytics as well as Datapools, will be in preview soon and I wanted to explain in this blog what it is and how it can help you get value out of...
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Azure SQL Database high availability
In this blog I want to talk about how Azure SQL Database achieves high availability. One of the major benefits from moving from on-prem SQL Server to Azure SQL Database is how much easier it is to...
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Azure SQL Database disaster recovery
My last blog post was on Azure SQL Database high availability and I would like to continue along that discussion with a blog post about disaster recovery in Azure SQL Database. First, a clarification...
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Azure SQL Database Read Scale-Out
Read Scale-Out is a little-known feature that allows you to load balance Azure SQL Database read-only workloads using the capacity of read-only replicas, for free. As mentioned in my blog Azure SQL...
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Azure Database Migration Service (DMS)
As I first mentioned in my blog Microsoft database migration tools, the Azure Database Migration Service (DMS) is a PaaS solution that makes it easy to migrate from on-prem/RDS to Azure and one...
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Azure SQL Database Hyperscale
At Microsoft Ignite, one of the announcements was for Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, which was made available in public preview October 1st, 2018 in 12 different Azure regions. SQL Database Hyperscale...
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SQL Server 2019 Big Data Clusters
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...
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Premium blob storage
As a follow-up to my blog Azure Archive Blob Storage, Microsoft has released another storage tier called Azure Premium Blob Storage (announcement). It is in private preview in US East 2, US Central...
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