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 KQL's scalar operators

It is impossible to cover all of KQL's operators and functions in one chapter. But in this section, we will learn about some of the common operators. We will introduce more operators and functions throughout the rest of the book.

KQL also supports arithmetic, logical, and relational operators. Let's quickly review these operators, beginning with the arithmetic operators, before diving into searching and filtering, since they are commonly used in queries.

Arithmetic operators

The arithmetic operators allow us to perform calculations on numbers and dates. We can use the print operator to print strings and the result of expressions.

Table 5.4 lists the operators in order of precedence:

Table 5.4 – Arithmetic operators for numerical values

Table 5.4 – Arithmetic operators for numerical values

The following print statement prints the result of 550 + 5, which is 555.

print 550 + 5

Using the parentheses, we can override the operator precedence...