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

Extra considerations

Now that we know how to design a Cosmos DB database (whether it's a document database or a key-value database), let's take some time to consider whether to use Azure SQL Database or Azure Cosmos DB. We didn't start this chapter with a discussion of big data and the four Vs for nothing! The JSON storage of Cosmos DB gives a lot of flexibility that comes in very handy when dealing with variability. The cluster technology and the fact that you can easily create copies of a Cosmos DB database around the globe provide enormous scalability possibilities.

At the same time, it should be noted that Azure SQL Database can scale up to many terabytes, can handle XML and JSON data, has node and edge tables to do graph database queries, and can create read-only replicas around the globe. Azure SQL Database is known and proven technology with more functionality inside the database itself. SQL databases are also very much capable of optimizing queries by taking...