Book Image

Cloud Scale Analytics with Azure Data Services

By : Patrik Borosch
Book Image

Cloud Scale Analytics with Azure Data Services

By: Patrik Borosch

Overview of this book

Azure Data Lake, the modern data warehouse architecture, and related data services on Azure enable organizations to build their own customized analytical platform to fit any analytical requirements in terms of volume, speed, and quality. This book is your guide to learning all the features and capabilities of Azure data services for storing, processing, and analyzing data (structured, unstructured, and semi-structured) of any size. You will explore key techniques for ingesting and storing data and perform batch, streaming, and interactive analytics. The book also shows you how to overcome various challenges and complexities relating to productivity and scaling. Next, you will be able to develop and run massive data workloads to perform different actions. Using a cloud-based big data-modern data warehouse-analytics setup, you will also be able to build secure, scalable data estates for enterprises. Finally, you will not only learn how to develop a data warehouse but also understand how to create enterprise-grade security and auditing big data programs. By the end of this Azure book, you will have learned how to develop a powerful and efficient analytical platform to meet enterprise needs.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Data Warehousing and Considerations Regarding Cloud Computing
4
Section 2: The Storage Layer
7
Section 3: Cloud-Scale Data Integration and Data Transformation
14
Section 4: Data Presentation, Dashboarding, and Distribution

Creating data models with Azure Analysis Services

AAS is a sibling of Power BI that can be provisioned from your Azure portal. Compared to Power BI, AAS doesn't offer the same visualization functionality, however. You would use Power BI or Excel or another tool that can talk DAX or Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) to consume the data model that you can build with AAS.

That is exactly the purpose of AAS: to act as a columnstore database and host a DAX data model just like you would create it with Power BI. AAS will give you a similar set of features and DAX functions when creating a data model that you have seen in this chapter already.

Up to now, the advantage of AAS over Power BI has been the higher amount of data that you could host with AAS. But with the current and further releases of Power BI and the Premium offering, these limits will vanish.

Microsoft has announced that Power BI Premium will be the superset of all the functions of both Power BI and AAS in the...