All good things in life consists of 3 parts, and so also this series of blogposts.  In previous blogposts we have been creating the Linked Services in Azure and CTAS’ing files from Azure Data Lake into tables on Azure DWH.  I finished my previous post by advising you to use Azure Data Factory V2 (ADF) as an orchestration tool for your ELT load. This is exactly what we’ll be doing in this post. 

Enter Polybase External Tables.  A technology introduced in SQL Server Parallel Datawarehouse (PDW) around 2013 and became more generally available since SQL 2016, allowing you to read flat files as easy as if they were database tables. 

How to best describe Azure Data Factory (ADF) V2?  A friend of mine described it as the ETL of the skies.  And since I based almost my entire career on ETL tools, this sounded like music to my ears. After running a nice project in ADF I can now look back on this statement, and conclude there is some truth behind it.

SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database introduced a whole new set of query improvements regarding performance. These modifications are all part of the so called “adaptive query processing feature family”, which includes three major changes. I'll focus on the batch mode adaptive joins.

You may have seen it pop up throughout our blogs and webinars in the past few months: the World Cup 2018 in Russia! Philippe Van Rillaer and I created a dashboard in Power BI about the historical results of previous World Cups, as well as results of the qualifiers for this year’s World Cup, the current teams that qualified, etc.

Op 22 juni zakte een delegatie van veertien Koherianen af naar het Duitse Lingen om het SQLGrillen 2018-event bij te wonen. Collega Ludo Bernaerts was ook van de partij. Lees zijn verslag van een dagje vol databases, bratwurst en bier.

On June 22 a delegation of fourteen Koherians went to Lingen in Germany to attend the event SQLGrillen 2018. Colleague Randi Vertongen joined the club. Read his report of a day full of databases, bratwurst and beer.

For the moment, SSRS (SQL server reporting services) is currently not an Azure component. Will it be available in the near future…? I don’t know. SSRS- functionalities become available in other dashboards and reporting tools like Power BI. Today, you’ll need to work with an on-premise installed SSRS server or you'll have to setup one in an Azure VM.

One little step in a migration track from on-premise to Azure is related to binary files like images, pdf and others. These files are often stored on many different places. When these files are stored in SQL, you probably have already created a variety of SQL procedures. But you can also use Azure blob-storage.