This week saw the return of Microsoft's Future Decoded event at London's ExCel. It was my third time at this two-day exhibitor backed event and it certainly won't be my last. As a Data Platform person it's always great attending conferences for all things under the Microsoft umbrella, not just data, it's a real eye … Continue reading Future Decoded 2018 – My Quick Review
Author: mrpaulandrew
Principal consultant and architect specialising in big data solutions on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Data engineering competencies include Azure Data Factory, Data Lake, Databricks, Stream Analytics, Event Hub, IoT Hub, Functions, Automation, Logic Apps and of course the complete SQL Server business intelligence stack.
Many years’ experience working within healthcare, retail and gaming verticals delivering analytics using industry leading methods and technical design patterns.
STEM ambassador and very active member of the data platform community delivering training and technical sessions at conferences both nationally and internationally.
Father, husband, swimmer, cyclist, runner, blood donor, geek, Lego and Star Wars fan!
What is Azure Data Factory Data Flow?
There were many great announcements to come out of the Microsoft Ignite 2018 conference, but the main one for me was the introduction of Azure Data Factory Data Flow. As a business intelligence person with many years experience working with SSIS packages this new feature is very exciting! Since I first saw the mock up … Continue reading What is Azure Data Factory Data Flow?
Preparing My Community Sessions for 2019
Hey friends & SQL family, its been a great year of tech and events so far, but now with several big conferences planning next years agendas its time to think ahead. Below I've prepared titles and abstracts for talks I'd like to deliver to our awesome data platform community in 2019. 5x regular sessions. 2x … Continue reading Preparing My Community Sessions for 2019
Execute All SSIS Packages in Parallel with ADFv2 Lookup and ForEach Activities
Just a quick post friends following a talk I did on Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 at SQL Saturday Manchester. In the talk I demonstrated using ADF more dynamically now version 2 supports expressions and parameters... Amongst other cool stuff I specifically showed how you could run your SSIS packages, scaled out across all the … Continue reading Execute All SSIS Packages in Parallel with ADFv2 Lookup and ForEach Activities
How To Control the SSIS IR From Your ADFv2 Pipelines – Start/Stop
Hello friends, in this post I want to share with you a couple of methods I've developed for controlling the start up and stop of the Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 SSIS Integration Runtime (IR) from your pipelines. This requirement came about mainly because of cost... The SSIS IR underneath is simply a cluster of … Continue reading How To Control the SSIS IR From Your ADFv2 Pipelines – Start/Stop
Using the ADFv2 Until Activity
Hello friends, with this post I wanted to give you a quick 'how to' guide when working with the Azure Data Factory (ADF) v2 Until activity... Having implemented the activity several times in production I've repeatedly found the current Microsoft documentation here falling a little short in its explanations and examples. So, I've created my … Continue reading Using the ADFv2 Until Activity
T-SQL to U-SQL Data Type Conversion
This is just a quick post, mainly for my own reference. When working with code generated solutions we often need to convert datasets from SQL Server (T-SQL) data types to Azure Data Lake Analytics (U-SQL) data types. As you probably know U-SQL has a hybrid syntax of T-SQL and C# which uses .Net data types. … Continue reading T-SQL to U-SQL Data Type Conversion
