Cortana Intelligence in a Nutshell — Part 1

One of the first things we explain to our future customers, is what is available and what is possible with the Cortana Intelligence Suite. With following story I want to discuss each product and give a real-time usage example.

Cortana Intelligence Overview

So lets start with the Information Management products

Let’s move that data — Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is NOT SSIS in the cloud, but it looks a bit like the control flows of SSIS. Data Factory is a Data Orchestration tool that allows the creation of pipelines (workflows) that ingest, prepare, transform, analyse and publish data from on-premises or cloud sources to any tools available in the Cortana Intelligence Suite. Off course monitoring and management are included too.

Example: Move your data from a Storage Account straight into your Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Let’s document your data — Data Catalog

Azure Data Catalog is a single, central place for all users of an organisation to contribute their knowledge and build a community and culture of data.
Think about questions as: What data does my company have? Who is the owner of the data? How can I connect to it? Do I have access to it? What is the meaning of that column?
Data Catalog is a web portal where your organisation’s data sources are all brought together.

Example: As a data scientist, you want get access to a certain data sets. Then you can look up in the Data Catalog who the owner is and ask him to give you access.

Let’s ingest it — Event Hub

Azure Event Hub is a data streaming platform and ingestion service capable of processing millions of events per second. It takes in data from software or devices and can transform and store it. At the same time it can perform real-time analytics on the data with for example Azure Machine Learning. And finish it off with sending it to your Power BI Dashboard.

Example: In a hospital we keep track of many vital parameters of the patients. Every second we receive the heart-rate, blood-pressure, and so on. By making use of all the historical data, we have trained a model that can predict if someone is getting a cardiac arrest in the next half hour. All of this is only possible with the real-time data we are receiving.

What’s Next?

In Part 2 will discuss the Big Data Stores that are available in the Cortana Intelligence Suite.