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Tag Archive: Azure

  • Azure Data Factory Pricing – How much is my pipeline actually costing me?

    December 1st, 2022 in ADFv2, Azure, Blog, Data Factory

    Has a client ever asked you how much it actually costs to run a single pipeline in Azure Data Factory? Have you ever thought ADF pricing is just a black box? Well, hopefully my latest blog post will give you an indication on how you can start calculating the cost of a pipeline run! I will base my analysis on a sample pipeline containing the following activities as shown below: 1 x Lookup Activity (Pipeline Activity) 1 x Copy Data Activity (Data…

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  • Part 2 : Natural Language Processing- Key Word Analysis

    August 10th, 2022 in AI, Azure, Big Data, Blog, Machine Learning, Python, Uncategorized

    Here we are with part 2 of this blog series on web scraping and natural language processing (NLP). In the first part I discussed what web scraping was, why it’s done and how it can be done. In this part I will give you details on what NLP is at a high level, and then go into detail of an application of NLP called key word analysis (KWA). What is NLP? NLP is a form of artificial intelligence which deals with the interactions between humans…

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  • Query Store Forced Plan Failures

    July 28th, 2022 in Azure, Blog, SQL Server, Uncategorized

    Query Store is a fantastic feature of both SQL Server and Azure SQL DB. It allows you to monitor how queries execute against the database which is invaluable for troubleshooting performance issues. More than that though, it gives you the option to force an erratic query to use a particular execution plan, this helps avoid queries from running with inefficient plans and provides predictability and stability on the server. Here we can see an…

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  • Part 1: Web Scraping and Natural Language Processing- Web Scraping

    July 18th, 2022 in AI, Blog, Machine Learning, Python

    In this multi blog series I will go through what web scraping is, what Natural Language processing is as a general term as well as diving into some constituent techniques we are interested in; key word extraction, sentiment analysis and its derivative opinion mining. The last few parts will then go through a coded example of scraping the popular review site Trust pilot for reviews of the popular supermarket chain ‘Lidl’. We will then…

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  • Combining Queries from Multiple Sources in Power BI using Merge and Append

    March 1st, 2022 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server, Uncategorized

    It is always good practice to do as much data preparation as close to the sources as you can before importing or connecting them to your Power BI reports, but what if there are circumstances where this isn’t possible? I had an issue recently where a third-party application had been updated and both the new and legacy versions were being used side-by-side. Logging data from both versions was being written to two separate Azure SQL databases.…

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  • Azure Backup for Virtual Machines

    January 10th, 2022 in Azure, Backup, Blog

    Configuring Backups Backups are configured for each VM individually, selecting their own retention policies and routines. They can however utilise the same storage and vaults. 1. Select the Backup option under “Operations” in the sidebar of the VM management page, on https://portal.azure.com/ 2. Give your backup Vault a name, (where the backups will be stored), and select the resource group you’d like it to be in. 3.…

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  • Azure Storage Backup Retention

    November 22nd, 2021 in Analysis Services, Azure, Blog, PowerShell

    This blog is a follow up to a previous blog I wrote about backing up Azure Analysis Services cubes in Azure, that blog can be found here. This blog shows how to implement a retention policy using PowerShell in Azure Runbooks to remove the backups after a set number of days. To create a new Runbook in the Azure portal, go to the relevant Automation account in the relevant resource group and then select Runbooks from the left hand pane. Note you…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part2)

    July 30th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse

    So in part 1 we found out what Workload Management was and why we wanted to use it. (If you haven’t read that part, please click here and read that post before you carry on, as we’re jumping in at the deep end!) In this part we’ll be learning how to configure it. Continuing from the end of the previous post, you have two main options to configure this. First is to assign a user or role to one of the existing system defined…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: What is Workload Management (part1)

    June 10th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, Business Intelligence, Synapse

    So you’ve started using Synapse SQL Pools, you’ve scaled up to improve performance, but your queries aren’t going as fast as you’d hoped. You take a look at resource utilisation and you see that as you scale up, your total resource utilisation per query goes down. But didn’t we scale up to allow our query to use more resource and run quicker? What’s going on here? A little thing called Workload Management.…

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  • Azure Synapse Series: Hash Distribution and Shuffle

    March 5th, 2021 in Azure, Blog, SQL Server, Synapse

    For this post I’m going to presume you’ve already taken a look at distributing your data using a hash column, and you’re not experiencing the performance you’re expecting. (If you’re not already aware of what this is, take a look at the following link to learn the basics of what a distributed table is and why you need it in Azure Synapse. I’ll be here when you get back.)…

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