Book Image

Azure Data and AI Architect Handbook

By : Olivier Mertens, Breght Van Baelen
Book Image

Azure Data and AI Architect Handbook

By: Olivier Mertens, Breght Van Baelen

Overview of this book

With data’s growing importance in businesses, the need for cloud data and AI architects has never been higher. The Azure Data and AI Architect Handbook is designed to assist any data professional or academic looking to advance their cloud data platform designing skills. This book will help you understand all the individual components of an end-to-end data architecture and how to piece them together into a scalable and robust solution. You’ll begin by getting to grips with core data architecture design concepts and Azure Data & AI services, before exploring cloud landing zones and best practices for building up an enterprise-scale data platform from scratch. Next, you’ll take a deep dive into various data domains such as data engineering, business intelligence, data science, and data governance. As you advance, you’ll cover topics ranging from learning different methods of ingesting data into the cloud to designing the right data warehousing solution, managing large-scale data transformations, extracting valuable insights, and learning how to leverage cloud computing to drive advanced analytical workloads. Finally, you’ll discover how to add data governance, compliance, and security to solutions. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the expertise needed to become a well-rounded Azure Data & AI architect.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Azure Data Architect
4
Part 2: Data Engineering on Azure
8
Part 3: Data Warehousing and Analytics
13
Part 4: Data Security, Governance, and Compliance

Learning how Power BI works

The main usage of Power BI is creating reports that give insights into data. An example of such a Power BI report can be seen here.

Figure 8.1 – An example of a Power BI report

Figure 8.1 – An example of a Power BI report

To build and share these reports, Power BI uses multiple tools, such as Power BI Desktop, the Power BI service, and Power BI Report Server. In this section, we try to make sense of the tools and when to use them. We will split up the workings of Power BI into four layers:

  • Get data
  • Transform and visualize
  • Share and collaborate
  • Consume

We will give an overview of the layers here, before deep diving in a practical example in the Practice your skills section.

The get data layer describes connectors for getting data in Power BI. The transform and visualize layer uses Power BI Desktop, a free tool that allows you to transform data and develop reports on your desktop computer. Once ready, reports can be published to either...