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

Introducing Infrastructure as Code

The Azure portal is a good place to start learning about different Azure resources. The simple user interface and rich documentation enables us to get up and running quickly. One of the disadvantages of using the portal is the deployment process is not consistently repeatable. Every time you want to deploy a resource, you must step through the wizard, which increases the chances of human error, such as specifying the incorrect location or even the incorrect subscription if you manage multiple subscriptions.

The preferred method for deploying and managing infrastructure is called Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC allows us to declare our infrastructure as code, giving us all the benefits of software development, for example, CI/CD, source control, code reviews, versioning, and so on. Since our infrastructure is in code, we can safely and reliably deploy our infrastructure consistently by deploying our code. This ability to deploy your infrastructure...