Book Image

Scalable Data Analytics with Azure Data Explorer

By : Jason Myerscough
Book Image

Scalable Data Analytics with Azure Data Explorer

By: Jason Myerscough

Overview of this book

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) enables developers and data scientists to make data-driven business decisions. This book will help you rapidly explore and query your data at scale and secure your ADX clusters. The book begins by introducing you to ADX, its architecture, core features, and benefits. You'll learn how to securely deploy ADX instances and navigate through the ADX Web UI, cover data ingestion, and discover how to query and visualize your data using the powerful Kusto Query Language (KQL). Next, you'll get to grips with KQL operators and functions to efficiently query and explore your data, as well as perform time series analysis and search for anomalies and trends in your data. As you progress through the chapters, you'll explore advanced ADX topics, including deploying your ADX instances using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The book also shows you how to manage your cluster performance and monthly ADX costs by handling cluster scaling and data retention periods. Finally, you'll understand how to secure your ADX environment by restricting access with best practices for improving your KQL query performance. By the end of this Azure book, you'll be able to securely deploy your own ADX instance, ingest data from multiple sources, rapidly query your data, and produce reports with KQL and Power BI.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Azure Data Explorer
5
Section 2: Querying and Visualizing Your Data
11
Section 3: Advanced Azure Data Explorer Topics

Chapter 2: Building Your Azure Data Explorer Environment

In the previous chapter, we introduced the data analytics pipeline, Azure Data Explorer (ADX), and executed our first Kusto Query Language (KQL) query on a publicly available demo cluster provided by Microsoft.

In this chapter, we will assume you have just created a new Azure account and begin by creating a new subscription. Once we have a subscription, we can start creating Azure resources, such as Azure Cloud Shell and ADX instances.

Next, we will introduce you to Cloud Shell, provision our first Cloud Shell instance, and discover one of the least known but extremely useful features, the lightweight code editor.

Then, we will create our first ADX clusters and database via the Azure portal, introduce the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and discuss some of the benefits and why IaC should be your preferred method for managing infrastructure on Azure.

Next, we will use Cloud Shell to recreate our ADX clusters...