Pass East Midlands April Ish 2017 Meetup

30 Mar 2017

On 30 March I attended the PASS East Midlands April-ish 2017 Meetup at Capital One’s offices in Nottingham.

There was a two-part presentation on Azure SQL DataWarehouse by Simon Whitely, the description from the Meetup event was as follows:

Azure SQL DataWarehouse is here and being pushed as the answer to huge structured data stores in the cloud, but what does that mean to you? Reflecting on a large-scale Azure SQLDW project, this session gathers together learnings, successes, failures and general opinions into a crash course in using Azure SQL DataWarehouse “properly”. We’ll start by quickly putting the technology in context, so you know WHEN to use it, WHERE it’s appropriate and WHY it works the way it does.

  • Introducing the SQLDW technology
  • Explaining distributions & performance
  • Explaining polybase We will then dive into HOW to use it, looking at some real-life design patterns, best practice and some “tales from the trenches” from a recent large Azure SQLDW project.
  • Performance tips & tricks (designing for minimal data movement, managing distribution skew, CTAS, Resource classes and more)
  • ETL Patterns (Surrogate keys & Orchestration)
  • Common Mistakes & Pitfalls
  • Conclusions & Recommendations

The same information was presented by Simon at the SQL Bits conference and there is a free Microsoft EDX course available to learn about Azure Data Warehouse.

The presentation was very interesting and with a good context of having actually had to use the tools to carry out real world implementations, this built on some of the information about getting data into databases (cloud based or otherwise!) which I’d learned about at the previous PASS session.

I’m not involved in any data warehousing projects at the moment but this presentation and the slides Simon was kind enough to share with the attendees will definitely be useful in the future.

Links:

https://twitter.com/MrSiWhiteley

http://eastmidlands.pass.org/

http://www.pass.org

https://www.sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event16/Azure_SQL_DataWarehouse_0-100_DWUs

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1%3AMicrosoft%2BDAT220x%2B1T2017/