Welcome to the Blog & Website of Paul Andrew
Technical Leadership Centred Around the Microsoft Data Platform
Bringing the Data Platform Workspace and the Power Platform workspace Together Over the last 18 months or so I've been watching and supporting the development of Microsoft's new Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that has now been named at MSBuild 2023 as Microsoft Fabric. As a Microsoft MVP I've be aware of this offering … Continue reading What Is Microsoft Fabric? My Point of View
Recording from the Hybrid Virtual Group MeetUp Abstract Once upon a time, there was a data warehouse and it lived happily as a set of tables within our relational database management system (RDMS) called Microsoft SQL Server. The data warehouse had three children known as extract, transform, and load. One day a blue/azure coloured cloud … Continue reading An Introduction to Delta Lakes and Delta Lake-Houses
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 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 … Continue reading An Architects Guide to Delivering Data Insights Using the Microsoft Azure Data Platform
Renewing my post from last year (here) I've gathered my thoughts and put together the following content that I'd like to deliver to our wonderful data platform community in 2020. 2019 has been a great year for me having delivered 30 talks, in 17 cities and 8 different countries. This brings my grand total to … Continue reading My Community Talks 2020
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
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
A tool I've used in the past to query my local disk drives is WinDirStat. It's great for finding out where large files are hiding in your directories using a heat map visual. In this post I talk you through how I've created a similar tool for Azure Data Lake Store using PowerShell, SQL Server … Continue reading Azure Data Lake Store – Files Dashboard
Sadly this post has been born out of frustration, so please accept my apologies from the outset if that comes across in the tone. That said, I imagine anyone reading it will empathise and will have come across the post while searching for an understanding of some inconsistencies when using service principals to authenticate against … Continue reading Azure Data Factory v1 & v2 Service Principal Authentication for Azure Data Lake
Happy New Year folks and welcome back to work! I hope you had a nice break. 🙂 I decided to kick off the new year of blogging with something fairly simple following some support work I did helping out a friend in the community. The problem encountered was twofold when dealing with data in Azure … Continue reading Using U-SQL Split to Handle Variable Width Datasets
Welcome to the Blog & Website of Paul Andrew 