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  • Recursive U-SQL With PowerShell (U-SQL Looping)

    May 7th, 2017 in Azure, Blog, PowerShell, U-SQL, Visual Studio

    In its natural form U-SQL does not support recursive operations and for good reason. This is a big data, scale out, declarative language where the inclusion of procedural, iterative code would be very unnatural. That said, if you must pervert things PowerShell can assist with the looping and dare I say the possibility for dynamic U-SQL. A couple of caveats… From the outset, I accept this abstraction with PowerShell to achieve some…

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  • Calling U-SQL Stored Procedures with C# Code Behind

    April 22nd, 2017 in Azure, Blog, C#, U-SQL, Visual Studio

    So friends, some more lessons learnt when developing with U-SQL and Azure Data Lake. I’ll try and keep this short. Problem You have a U-SQL stored procedure written and working fine within your Azure Data Lake Analytics service. But we need to add some more business logic or something requiring a little C# magic. This is the main thing I love about U-SQL, having that C# code behind file where I can extend my normal SQL behaviour. So,…

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  • Using Azure Data Factory Configuration Files

    January 23rd, 2017 in Azure, Blog, JSON, Visual Studio

    Like most things developed its very normal to have multiple environments for the same solution; dev, test, prod etc. Azure Data Factory is no exception to this. However, where it does differ slightly is the way it handles publishing to different environments from the Visual Studio tools provided. In this post we’ll explore exactly how to create Azure Data Factory (ADF) configuration files to support such deployments to different Azure…

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  • Writing a U-SQL Merge Statement

    December 13th, 2016 in Azure, Blog, C#, U-SQL, Visual Studio

    Unlike T-SQL, U-SQL does not currently support MERGE statements. Our friend that we have come to know and love since its introduction in SQL Server 2008. Not only that, but U-SQL also doesn’t currently support UPDATE statements either… I know… Open mouth emoji required! This immediately leads to the problem of change detection in our data and how, for example, we should handle the ingestion of a daily rolling 28-day TSV extract,…

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  • Azure Data Lake Authentication from Azure Data Factory

    December 2nd, 2016 in Azure, Blog, C#, PowerShell, Visual Studio

    rereTo set the scene for the title of this blog post lets firstly think about other services within Azure. You’ll probably already know that most services deployed require authentication via some form of connection string and generated key. These keys can be granted various levels of access and also recycled as required, for example an IoT Event Hub seen below (my favourite service to play with). Then we have other services like SQLDB that…

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  • Creating Azure Data Factory Custom Activities

    November 4th, 2016 in Azure, Blog, C#, JSON, Visual Studio

    When creating an Azure Data Factory (ADF) solution you’ll quickly find that currently it’s connectors are pretty limited to just other Azure services and the T within ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is completely missing altogether. In these situations where other functionality is required we need to rely on the extensibility of Custom Activities. A Custom Activity allows the use of .Net programming within your ADF pipeline.…

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  • Changing the Start Up App on Windows 10 IoT Core

    August 19th, 2016 in Blog, IoT, PowerShell, UWP, Visual Studio, Windows

    Changing the start up application on your IoT device running Windows IoT Core seems to be a common requirement once the device is out in the field so I hope this post exploring a few different ways of doing this will be of value to people. To clarify the behaviour we will achieve below is from device power on our Windows 10 IoT Core operating system will boot up. But instead of starting the default application which is originally named…

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