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

Key-value databases

With Azure Table storage (or just Azure tables), Microsoft also offers a key-value database. The Table API of Cosmos DB lets you write code against Cosmos DB as if it were a key-value database. This should facilitate the migration of Azure tables implementations to Cosmos DB. Azure tables have less functionality than Cosmos DB but are also cheaper. It is worth looking into key-value databases.

A key-value database stores data in values. Values can easily be retrieved using a key. It is comparable to a table with just two columns, a key column and a value column. The key is likely informative data by itself. The value is likely compound information.

Suppose you create an account on a website based on a key-value database. Your email address is used as the username. Your email address would be the key of the underlying key-value database. Using a hashing algorithm, the key determines the cluster node to store the data on. The value stores all the information...