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

Using PolyBase to load data

There are multiple ways to add data to a Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pool. The recommended way that provides the best performance is by using PolyBase. PolyBase is a feature that enables you to write T-SQL queries in Synapse to query data that is stored in databases other than your Synapse SQL pool. There are multiple databases that PolyBase can read data from, but the most obvious one is reading data from a data lake. In Azure, we implement data lakes in Azure Storage. You will learn about that in Chapter 10, Designing and Implementing a Data Lake Using Azure Storage. For now, we will start by uploading data to the data lake account you created in the Provisioning a Synapse Analytics workspace section:

  1. In the Azure portal, open the menu of the portal on the left-hand side of the screen and click on Resource groups.
  2. Click on the resource group you created for this book (DesignDatabases if you followed the steps as described in the book).
  3. ...