Hybrid, End-to-End; Power BI, Azure SQL Database, Data Factory

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Reza Rad

With the announcement of Power BI a week ago and with great features in this product, there are many opportunities that this product and service can be used. Power BI can be used alongside some other Azure services, and even On-Premises services to build an end-to-end enterprise BI and Data Analysis Solution. In this post I’ll just explain one example scenario of Hybrid and End-to-End BI solution that uses below technologies;

Data Sources On-Premises
Azure Data Factory or SSIS with Azure Pack for Data extraction and transformation
Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Data Warehouse as the database / data warehouse engine in cloud
Power BI as the data analysis and front-end tool

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Azure Data Catalog; What to Expect this Monday?

Posted on July 11, 2015 by Reza Rad

Thrilling news of public preview availability of Azure Data Catalog spread the word from Joseph Sirosh’s blog post yesterday; Azure Data Catalog will be available for public preview this Monday 13th of July. This is great step forward for using metadata alongside tools for extracting and visualization of the data. I would like to share my thoughts about what is a data catalog and what to expect from it on Monday.

What is Data Catalog; Data Catalog contains metadata related to the data source, metadata can contains tags, comments, descriptions, annotations…. about data source, tables, views, indexes, and all other objects in the data source. Most of you worked with databases (readers of my blog are database pros usually 😉 ). In all database environments there are two sides; business and IT (or let’s say owner, producers, or consumers of the database technology). Business usually understand concepts, while IT understand database structure. Metadata stored in a data catalog is the connection between these two.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 7: Azure

Posted on April 30, 2015May 3, 2015 by Reza Rad

Many organizations nowadays are in transition from on-premises to cloud, and many of them use hybrid solutions where part of the computing will be done in cloud and the rest on-premises. The trend nowadays is to use cloud to have better maintenance, lower costs, more reliable solutions, lower administrative efforts, and powerful shared resources. In BI world there is a high demand for solutions to be on cloud, some computing services such as data transfer and ETL to be done on cloud, some data analysis and mining solutions happens on cloud, and even data to be stored on cloud data warehouse at some stage. There are many BI vendors in the market, but there are few who provide BI on the cloud.

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Walk-through Steps: I’m New to BI, Where to Start? – Part 6: Data Mining

Posted on April 29, 2015May 3, 2015 by Reza Rad

Data Scientist is a hot job nowadays in the market and there are lots of demand for it. Data Science origins from the BI field and sits under umbrella of Business Intelligence, because the data science and data mining helps decision makers in their decision making process. To have an idea about how data mining can solve real world issues, think about loyalty program of the super market that you usually use close to your home. Loyalty program simply analyze your purchase history and based on that it comes up with some suggestion and prediction about your next purchases and will promote that through your cell phone text messages or email or even flyers directly addressed to your home address.

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Configure Data Management Gateway from Azure Portal

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Reza Rad

Today I’ve faced an issue; when the Power BI Admin Center does not work I want to configure and set up Data Management Gateway. Data Management Gateways is a service that install on your machine or any on premises server, and allow cloud services (such as Power BI or Azure Data Factory) to connect to Read more about Configure Data Management Gateway from Azure Portal[…]