Book Image

Data Modeling for Azure Data Services

By : Peter ter Braake
Book Image

Data Modeling for Azure Data Services

By: Peter ter Braake

Overview of this book

Data is at the heart of all applications and forms the foundation of modern data-driven businesses. With the multitude of data-related use cases and the availability of different data services, choosing the right service and implementing the right design becomes paramount to successful implementation. Data Modeling for Azure Data Services starts with an introduction to databases, entity analysis, and normalizing data. The book then shows you how to design a NoSQL database for optimal performance and scalability and covers how to provision and implement Azure SQL DB, Azure Cosmos DB, and Azure Synapse SQL Pool. As you progress through the chapters, you'll learn about data analytics, Azure Data Lake, and Azure SQL Data Warehouse and explore dimensional modeling, data vault modeling, along with designing and implementing a Data Lake using Azure Storage. You'll also learn how to implement ETL with Azure Data Factory. By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of which Azure data services are the best fit for your model and how to implement the best design for your solution.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Operational/OLTP Databases
8
Section 2 – Analytics with a Data Lake and Data Warehouse
13
Section 3 – ETL with Azure Data Factory

Overview of Synapse Analytics

Synapse Analytics is a platform comprising multiple components that can all work together to provide an end-to-end analytical solution. As explained in Chapter 7, Dimensional Modeling, performing analytics on operational databases comes with challenges and limitations. In a modern environment, you gather data from various source systems in a data lake. The data in the data lake might need validation and curation. The data can then serve as a source for a dimensionally modeled data mart that acts as a serving layer to enable users to actually use the data.

This process involves moving data from one layer to the next, processing the data, transforming the data, and serving the data to users and applications such as Azure Analysis Services and Power BI. Synapse Analytics brings all this together in one suite. It comes with Synapse Analytics Studio, a web-based environment to create and manage the entire solution. Figure 8.1 shows a schematic of Azure Synapse...