dataMinds News Round up – January 2021
Databricks
Tomaž Kaštrun finished his advent series, which consist in 31 hands-on blog posts ranging from how to get started with DataBricks to performance tuning of Apache Spark. Definitely worth taking a look at.
Denny Lee, Shixiong Zhu and Scott Sandre wrote about how you can now natively query a Delta Lake, the open-source storage layer that brings reliability to data lakes, with Scala, Java and Python.
Azure Synapse Analytics
Are you new to Azure Synpase Analytics workspaces? This web-native experience unifies end-to-end analytics solutions for data engineers to empower and enable them to ingest, explore, prepare, orchestrate, and visualize their data through one experience by utilizing either SQL or Spark pools. Wandering how to set this up? Ron L’Esteve walks the talk!
Inderjit Rana shares his findings about a cost optimization exercise of a Azure Synapse Reserved Instance. Interested in saving costs yourself? Make sure to check out Inderjit’s article!
SQL
James Serra discusses the various ways to keep your SQL Server databases and SQL Database/SQL Managed Instance (SQL MI) databases in-sync asynchronously. The main use cases for syncing databases are to distribute reads, for a hybrid application, for a globally distributed application or to keep a test or development database in sync with a production database.
Organizations are generally not single-minded behemoths. Grant Fritchey makes the tradeoff between data residing on-premise versus data residing in the cloud. Will hibrid models continue on trending in 2021?
Azure SQL Hyperscale is the latest architectural evolution of Azure SQL, which has been natively designed to take advantage of the cloud. Davide Mauri autoscales a service with an Azure Function, with minimal service interruption and implementing correct connection retry logic.
Ever wondered how you can efficiently plot waiting statistics from your SQL Server instance over time? Michael J. Swart dived into this one and elaborates on how you can easily set this up yourself.
Power BI
At the end of a year marked by the pandemic, it is time for SQLBI‘s review of what happened in the DAX realm. Marco Russo writes and speaks about what changed in the DAX world over the past year.
Melissa coates created a Power BI End-To-End Diagram, providing you with a structured overview of top features, key integration points and related services.