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

Implementing tables in Synapse SQL pools

In Chapter 4, Provisioning and Implementing an Azure SQL DB, we started with a section on SQL Server data types, followed by a section on quantifying the data model. We should do the same here. In Chapter 7, Dimensional Modeling, you learned how to create a logical model of a star schema database. You will have to translate the logical model into a physical model before implementing the database. Luckily for us, Synapse Analytics SQL pools are based on SQL Server. That means we have the same data type system. You might want to re-read the section SQL Server data types of Chapter 4, Provisioning and Implementing an Azure SQL DB.

Quantifying the model and understanding how your SQL pool will be used is also important before implementing the tables. With a Synapse SQL pool, there is an additional design step that is very important. As we already said, a SQL pool is implemented by using 60 databases, called distributions. You need to decide for...