Tag Archives: Azure

How to Automate Processing of Azure Analysis Services Models

I’ve been working on a proof of concept for a customer that involved using Azure Analysis Services as a cache for some data in an Azure Data Warehouse instance. One of the things I’ve been working on is scheduling the automatic processing of the Azure AS database. I did find the following documentation on the process, but the screenshots of the Azure portal are out of date and I did find some errors in the instructions. I also found this very extensive project for partition management in Azure AS, but this was a little overkill for my purposes and I was just interested in the very basics.

Read my recap for MS Data Summit here

These previously mentioned resources led me to write this blog post. In this post I’m going to leverage the previously mentioned article and walk through creating an Azure Function App to automatically refresh my Azure Analysis Services model, while correcting a few errors and updating the screenshots.

If you’re new to Azure Analysis Services, take a look at this documentation. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you have a basic understanding of Analysis Services.

Continue reading How to Automate Processing of Azure Analysis Services Models

Setting up Cross Database Queries in Azure SQL Database

A question that I answer what seems like all the time is how to run cross-database queries against Azure SQL Database. So rather than answering those questions repeatedly I figured I should blog my response up so from here on out I can just forward the link to this blog on to my customers and others interested.

Most people I talk to still think that cross-database queries in Azure SQL DB aren’t possible. But thanks to a new feature called “Elastic Query”, we can issue cross database queries. There’s actually a few different types of cross database queries that Continue reading Setting up Cross Database Queries in Azure SQL Database

Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI

Recently I worked on a neat little POC with Patrick Leblanc for a customer in Education who wished to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on surveys completed by students regarding classes and instructors, which brings me to this blog post.

Using Azure ML and a free subscription to the Text Analytics API, I’m going to show you how to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction on Continue reading Sentiment Analysis & Key Phrase Detection w/ Power Query & Power BI

Power BI and Big Data

If you’re worked in the wide and diverse field of information technology for almost any amount of time, it probably hasn’t taken you long to discover that the one thing constant about IT is that the technologies and strategies involved change faster than you can learn them. And if you work in business intelligence like I do, you don’t have to look very far at all to see change. The Microsoft Power BI team rolls out a software update every month! If I want to stay learned up on the technology, I have to really be on top of things.

New to Power BI? Start here!

About ten years ago when Hadoop was first being developed at Yahoo, Continue reading Power BI and Big Data