April Dunnam posted: "#shorts #Launch #PowerFxSee how to use the Launch function in Power Fx to open external links in your Power Apps canvas applications. This can be used to open other Power Apps or external websites. You can even pass parameters from Power Apps to the links"
#shorts #Launch #PowerFx See how to use the Launch function in Power Fx to open external links in your Power Apps canvas applications. This can be used to open other Power Apps or external websites. You can even pass parameters from Power Apps to the links you want to open!
Paul Andrew posted: "Microsoft Ignite 2021 Announcements Another Microsoft Book of News, this time from Ignite 2021. Thanks Microsoft, really handy having all the announcements in one place. Not loads of Data & AI things shared at this event. But still 55 pages of some im"
Another Microsoft Book of News, this time from Ignite 2021. Thanks Microsoft, really handy having all the announcements in one place.
Not loads of Data & AI things shared at this event. But still 55 pages of some impressive additions to the Microsoft products.
My favourite bits as a Data Platform person:
Page 11 – Azure Synapse Pathway
With the launch of Azure Synapse Pathway, customers can simplify and accelerate migrating from a legacy or cloud data warehouse to Azure Synapse Analytics by providing automated translation of existing business logic. Azure Synapse is a limitless analytics service that brings together data integration, enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics to provide real-time data insights. This downloadable tool enables customers to access resources such as Teradata, SQL Server, Netezza, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift and others. This allows automatic translation of more than 100,000 lines of SQL
Page 11 – Azure Stream Analytics
Azure Stream Analytics, now generally available, has been updated to provide support for single tenant dedicated clusters. Azure Stream Analytics Dedicated provides single tenant hosting for increased reliability with no noise from other tenants. Customer resources are "isolated" and perform better during bursts in traffic.
Page 11 – Azure Purview
Azure Purview's ability to automatically scan and classify data residing in AWS Simple Storage Services (S3), SAP ECC, SAP S4/HANA and Oracle Database is now available in preview. With this update, customers can automatically scan and classify data residing within various on-premises data stores using the Azure Purview Data Map. In addition, this data can now be discovered across the organization.
Azure Purview's ability to scan Azure Synapse Analytics workspaces is now available in preview. With this update, customers can discover and govern data across their serverless and dedicated SQL pools in Azure Synapse workspaces. This expands on Azure Purview's existing tools, enabling customers to scan data across various sources via out-of-the-box connectors in the Data Map.
Page 13 – Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Synapse Link for Azure Cosmos DB is now generally available. Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB enables cloud-native and near-realtime analytics to be run over the NoSQL data in Azure Cosmos DB, including MongoDB. Azure Synapse Link breaks down the barrier that h as long existed between online transactional processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) systems by linking Azure Cosmos DB to Azure Synapse Analytics.
Paul Andrew posted: "Azure Data Analytics End to End Let's start with a story, not a 'once upon a time story', a story for your backlog 🙂 As a solution architectI need to design and build an Azure data analytics platform end to endto deliver data insights for my custo"
Let's start with a story, not a 'once upon a time story', a story for your backlog 🙂
As a solution architect I need to design and build an Azure data analytics platform end to end to deliver data insights for my customer.
In February 2021 I delivered a talk as part of the Scottish Summit conference on how you could/should build an end to end data platform solution in Azure to deliver data insights and analytics. This is one of my favourite sessions so thought it worth re-sharing the recording here.
Talk Abstract
The resources on offer in Azure are constantly changing, which means as data professionals we need to constantly change too. Updating knowledge and learning new skills. No longer can we rely on products matured over a decade to deliver all our solution requirements. Today, data platform architectures designed in Azure with best intentions and known good practices can go out of date within months. That said, is there now a set of core components we can utilise in the Microsoft cloud to ingest and deliver insights from our data? When does ETL become ELT? When is IaaS better than PaaS? Do we need to consider scaling up or scaling out? And should we start making cost the primary factor for choosing certain technologies? In this session we'll explore the answers to all these questions and more from an architects viewpoint. Based on real world experience lets think about just how far the breadth of our knowledge now needs to reach when starting from nothing and building a complete Microsoft Azure Data Platform solution.
Recording
Outcome
Below is a view of the outcome from the session and the overall architecture that I talk about the delivery of and build up throughout the talk.
Paul Andrew posted: "Hi folks, as some of you may be aware it was the Microsoft MVP Summit in March, for MVP's this is an exciting time where Microsoft product teams share plans for the coming year and talk about features on the roadmap. That said, I have the privilege of "
Hi folks, as some of you may be aware it was the Microsoft MVP Summit in March, for MVP's this is an exciting time where Microsoft product teams share plans for the coming year and talk about features on the roadmap.
That said, I have the privilege of knowing what the future looks like for Azure Synapse Analytics and for although I can't share specifics of what's coming, I feel it's my duty to start thinking about what a complete Synapse architecture might look like in the near future when delivering a modern analytics platform. Hence this writing this blog 🙂
As a community let's all start thinking about this given the rich unified environment that Synapse Analytics offers. Below is a picture I've drawn as a starting point for a complete Synapse logical architecture. What do you think?
Azure Synapse Analytics Logical Architecture v1
Is this picture perfect? No.
Would we use every part of Synapse for every project? Probably not.
Are we going to use the new and shiny technology just for the sake of it? No.
Is having everything available as part of an integrated environment appealing? Yes, definitely.
So, given these answers, where would we use Synapse and where would we still use other Azure Resources – while we wait for the Synapse capabilities to mature?
I'll leave that question unanswered for now.
As you'll notice I've put a v1 on this blog title and will prepare a v2 once some things become public knowledge.
Paul Andrew posted: "Background Building on a previous blog post where I explored what a possible Azure Synapse Analytics logical architecture might look like in terms of end-to-end data curation/enrichment, here: Thinking about an Azure Synapse Analytics Logical Architect"
Now, with the recently added Synapse 'Managed Virtual Network' I'm exploring the same architecture from a physical network connectivity perspective.
Given all the different service offerings rolled up and unified within the Synapse Analytics resource connectivity was also going to be a concern. That concern, it seems, as now neatly been addressed with another bit of Microsoft IaaS abstraction.
As a data platform person, not really that comfortable dealing with network stuff, having these easy click options to add to our Synapse workspace is great:
Managed VNet's
Managed Private Endpoints
Managed Firewall's
Why? Well, there is certainly a newfound appetite for having all PaaS resources protected behind that extra layer of security in the form of private connections. No longer are we happy to simply open an Azure SQLDB to all other Azure resources, affectively adding a huge set of Microsoft IP ranges to the resource firewall.
So, friends, what do you think to the below picture as a first version for a complete Synapse data platform, all operating using private network connections? Surrounded in purple, I've also added a few other typically used Azure resources to highlight some wider integrations that might exist, all optional.
Caveats
A couple of things to call out here:
You can only enable the Managed VNet support for Synapse at the time the resource is first deployed. You can't have this capability added later to an existing Synapse instance.
What I've drawn in the Synapse Managed Resource Group is total guess work! Although the Resource Group is visible in your Azure Subscription and you can even 'unhide' some of the SQL contents, shown below, nothing more is known about the internals here. So, as I say, total guess work.
Other Thoughts
If we don't want to use the Microsoft Managed VNet and have the feature disabled for Synapse. There isn't yet an option to bring our own VNet, or use another established VNet on the corporate network. Hence, I choose to extend the diagram above with some possible options for Express Route connections etc. This is still just 1 way traffic for data sources getting data into Synapse though. As you'll see, we still have to hit the Synapse Workspace and SQL Endpoints via a public connection and using the local resource firewall to limit traffic.
What would be nice is to have the option to peer the Synapse VNet with a VNet of our own, like what can be done with Azure Databricks… Crudely drawn in the below picture with a thick red line 🙂
