Dr. Victoria Holt, Author at Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom

Azure Synapse: A Single Pane of Glass

Dr. Victoria Holt — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 11:23:06 +0000

A single pane of glass provides easy access and oversight to an array of tools and the unified interfaces to access them. When the number of tools and their functions grow, development and administration become harder when moving between many tools without clear connectivity. Having a single starting point that can show a holistic view and that simplifies tool interconnectivity helps save time and resources, as well as enabling more insightful analytics.

Over the years there has been a move away from single generic tools to a diverse sets of tools. Homogeneous oversight tools do work well in the early stages, but the array of technologies and tools will always increase and it will become harder and more time-consuming to connect to all the required apps and functions to complete any given task. Being able to pull all the data together in one place for analysis enables organisations to have a wide picture of their data and the predictive analytics that can be created and consumed in many user-friendly formats. There is no one size fits all, so adaptability is key.

To help navigate through that set of tools and functions, we have Azure Synapse. From its inception, it has been seen as a one-stop set of tools and technologies that provide that oh-so-important single pane of glass to help you understand and process your data wherever you need it. This innate flexibility, breadth and depth of tooling in Azure Synapse may at first glance appear complex; this perception brought about the opportunity to start a specialist conference to help developers and administrators understand the ecosystem and leverage the capabilities of this practically limitless service. This is how Data Toboggan came into being.

The first event was in January, when like-minded people around the globe joined together to learn about Azure Synapse, with 12 sessions being attended by over 500 attendees. Off the back of that success, we began planning two other one-day events for this year to make a series, and three one-day events per year after that. To promote an ‘always learning’ mindset, we also launched a user group – “Data Toboggan – Slide Preparation” – to run bi-monthly in between the main conferences.

On Saturday 12 June, we are running our second ’12 hours of Azure Synapse’ conference called “Data Toboggan – Cool Runnings“. The keynote speech for that event is being delivered by Robin Sutara, the Chief Data Officer at Microsoft UK, talking about Azure Synapse and its limitless analytics capability. We are pleased and excited that Robin has agreed to keynote our event.

We will also have several speakers from the Microsoft Synapse Product Group who will be able to talk about new features released at Microsoft Build and provide in depth product knowledge.

But the event is for the data community, and we’re delighted to host community speakers and MVPs such as Ginger Grant, Rob Farley, Cathrine Wilhelmsen, and Craig Porteous (to name but a few), sharing their knowledge of the vast array of products that connect to Azure Synapse. Sessions will include topics such as serverless, real time analytics, data flows, CI/CD, dedicated SQL pools, PowerShell, Synapse notebooks, Spark Machine learning in Azure Synapse workspace, and more! Then to add a little something extra, we have a set of lightning talks to pique your interest into other areas.

We will also be running a Cloud Skills Challenge for UK residents on Azure Synapse from 1st June until 23rd June! Find out more information on the Data Toboggan Cloud Skills Challenge page, and you can check out the terms and conditions here.

Learn More

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Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics

Dr. Victoria Holt — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 16:45:47 +0000

There is an imperative for digital transformation to take place, and the speed of that transformation will define an organisation’s future. It’s that tech intensity that Satya Nadella keeps mentioning.

The ability to empower people intelligently, virtually optimise operations and transform products is the future he sees. It’s this analytical power that will turn an organisation from being reactive into being proactive. This predictive power will transform organisations. Data is your most strategic asset and it should be listed as its own line as a business asset.

Azure Synapse is generally available, but a tool that I wasn’t aware of is Azure Synapse Link, which enables no complex Extract Transform Load (ETL) of data to get to the analytics.

Digital transformation is never done. It’s lots of little races to improve things. Once the data foundation is built there is freedom which enables flexibility to reimage the process then automate it. Data is going to define the century in the environment and health care resilience. The ability to test hypothesis’s in parallel and experiment every day transforms the efficiency and effectiveness of the world.

Microsoft has also announced Azure Purview, a unified data governance platform. It’ll change the way businesses grow and enable predictive power, with data governance being key to gaining control over the data. Reimagine data governance as the heart of every successful data project; data governance reimagined with a business glossary, a trusted data dictionary and no more building manual ontologies with automated classification. Plus a lineage function that you can use to look downstream to see where all the data is being used.

I see this as being amazingly helpful in supporting business. It’s a data map across your data estate that will register, scan and auto classify data. A business glossary helps drive meaning; Azure Purview changes the game in governance and was a missing piece.

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You can find more articles from Dr Victoria Holt on her blog, as well as on Twitter.

Learn more

Register for Data Toboggan – Cool Runnings, an Azure Synapse Analytics event scheduled for June 12th
Join the Data Taboggan – Slide Preparation group for more on Azure Synapse Analytics
Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics
Survey the Components of Azure Synapse Analytics
Use data loading best practices in Azure Synapse Analytics
What is Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB?

The post Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Get to grips with Azure Synapse with this free digital event

Dr. Victoria Holt — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 10:59:42 +0000

On December 3rd 2020 at the Shape Your Future with Azure Data and Analytics event, it was announced that Azure Synapse had entered general availability. This new analytics capability has several facets, including data integration, enterprise data warehousing, and big data analytics. The tool enables a holistic place to work with data for ingestion, the exploration of the data content and enabling immediate BI and machine learning.

A single place to prepare and manage data that will enable data scalability as data sets grow, while also being secure, is a useful place to start gaining data value. We all work with data that has challenges, from the everyday increasing volumes, the diversity in the data types and number of data sources coupled with the problem of poor data quality. Data management is requiring changes from batch processing to streaming processing that needs to be able to provide the nearest real time operational data to enable those fast business decisions. Some companies are using the capability to manage and quickly pivot their organisation during this Covid-19 time.

Data comes in diverse forms with polyglot persistence ripe in many organisations, and one size of storage does not fit all. Polyglot persistence sees the right storage engine being used for the data type, whether it’s RDBMS, Data Lake, Key-Value, Document, Graph or Column databases. This allows us to gain insight from all of these data sources in one place with ease, enabling intelligent management and critical actionable insights.

There is so much to learn about Azure Synapse, from Serverless SQL pools, Intelligent Workload Management and Cognitive Services integration, to streaming analytics, Azure Machine Learning integration and Azure Synapse link with Azure Cosmos DB.

I am pleased to be a part of a team putting on a community event on January 30th 2021 that will tell the story of Azure Synapse and its capabilities. There is so much to learn about this exciting technology, so please consider registering here for a 12 hour event that will cross global timelines. It’s free to register and attend, so do so today!

The event will include introduction-level sessions and in-depth sessions, so there’s something for everyone. We also have a great mix of international speakers including Ferenc Csonka, Cathrine Wilhelmsen, Terry McCann, Erwin de Kreuk, Simon Whiteley, Kevin Chant, Paul Andrew to name but a few.

Learn More

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