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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Power BI Performance Features
It’s hard to believe but Power BI has now been available for over 10 years (see history)! Over the last few years there have been a number of new features to improve the performance of queries for...
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Power BI connectors to Azure Synapse
When using Power BI and pulling data from Azure Synapse, you will use the “Get Data” feature in Power BI. There are now three connections that you can use that I will cover in this blog. But first, a...
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