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Hands-On Data Warehousing with Azure Data Factory

Chapter 1. The Modern Data Warehouse

Azure Data Factory(ADF) is a service that is available in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. This service allows the orchestration of different data loads and transfers in Azure.

Back in 2014, there were hardly any easy ways to schedule data transfers in Azure. There were a few open source solutions available, such as Apache Falcon and Oozie, but nothing was easily available as a service in Azure. Microsoft introduced ADF in public preview in October 2014, and the service went to general availability in July 2015.

The service allows the following actions:

Copying data from various sources and destinations
Calling various computation services, such as HDInsight and Azure data warehouse data transformations
Orchestrating the preceding activities using time slices and retrying the activities when there is an error

All these activities were available via the Azure portal at first, and in Visual Studio 2013 before general availability (GA).

The need for a data warehouse

A data warehouse is a repository of enterprise data used for reporting and analysis. There have been three waves of data warehouses so far, which we will cover in the upcoming subsections.

Driven by IT

This is the first wave of business intelligence (BI). IT needed to separate operational data and databases from its origin for the following reasons:

Keep data changes history. Some operational applications purge the data after a while.
When users wanted to report on the application's data, they were often affecting the performance of the system. IT replicated the operational data to another server to avoid any performance impact on applications.
Things got more complex when users wanted to do analysis and reports on databases from multiple enterprise's applications. IT had to replicate all the needed systems and make them speak together. This implied that new structures had to be built and new patterns emerged from there: star schemas, decision support systems (DSS), OLAP cubes, and so on.

Self-service BI

Analysts and users always need data warehouses to evolve at a faster pace. This is the second wave of BI and it happened when major BI players such as Microsoft and Click came with tools that enabled users to merge some data with or without data warehouses. In many enterprises, this is used as a temporary source of analytics or proof of concept. On the other hand, not every data could fit at that time in data warehouses. Many ad hoc reports were, and are still, using self-service BI tools. Here is a short list of such tools:

Microsoft Power Pivot
Microsoft Power BI
Click

Cloud-based BI – big data and artificial intelligence

This is the third wave of BI. The cloud capabilities enable enterprises to do more accurate analysis. Big data technologies allows users to base their analysis on much bigger data volumes. This helps them deriving patterns form the data and have technologies that incorporate and modify these patterns. This leads to artificial intelligence or AI.

Technologies used in big data are not that new. They were used by many search engines in the early 21st century such as Yahoo! and Google. They have also been used quite a lot in research faculties in different enterprises. The third wave of BI broaden the usage of these technologies. Vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon, or Google make it available to almost everyone with their cloud offer.]

The modern data warehouse

Microsoft, as well as many other service providers, have listed the concepts of the modern data warehouse as follows:

Here are some of the many features a modern data warehouse should have:

Integration of relational as well as non-relational sources: The data warehouse should be able to ingest data that is not easily integrable in the traditional data warehouse, such as big data, non-relational crunched data, and so on.
Hybrid deployment: The data warehouse should be able to extend the data warehouse from on-premises storage to the cloud.
Advanced analytics: The data warehouse should be able to analyze the data from all kinds of datasets using different modern machine learning tools.
In-database analytics: The data warehouse should be able to use Microsoft software that is integrated with some very powerful analytics open tools, such as R and Python, in its database. Also, with PolyBase integration, the data warehouse can integrate more data sources when it's based on SQL Server.

Main components of a data warehouse

This section will discuss the various parts of a data warehouse.

Staging area

In a classic data warehouse, this zone is usually a database and/or a schema in it that used to hold a copy of the data from the source systems. The staging area is necessary because most of the time, data sources are not stored on the same server as the data warehouse. Even if they are on the same server, we prefer a copy of them for the following reasons:

Preserve data integrity. All data is copied over from a specific point in time. This ensures that we have consistency between tables.
We might need specific indexes that we could not create in the source system. When we query the data, we're not necessarily making the same links (joins) in the source system. Therefore, we might have to create indexes to increase query performance.
Querying the source might have an impact on the performance of the source application. Usually, the staging area is used to bring just the changes from the source systems. This prevents processing too much data from the data source.

Not to mention that the data source might be files: CSV, XML, and so on. It’s much easier to bring their content in relational tables. From a modern data warehouse perspective, this means storing the files in HDFS and separating them using dates.

In a modern data warehouse, if we’re in the cloud only, relational data can still be stored in databases. The only difference might be in the location of the databases. In Azure, we can use Azure SQL tables or Azure data warehouse.

Data warehouse

This is where the data is copied over from the staging area. There are several schools of thought that define the data warehouse:

Kimball group data warehouse bus: Ralph Kimball was a pioneer in data warehousing. He and his colleagues wrote many books and articles on their method. It consists of conformed dimensions that can be used by many business processes. For example, if we have a dimension named DimCustomer, we should link it to all fact tables that store customers. We should not create another dimension that redefines our customers. The following link gives more information on the Kimball group method: https://www.kimballgroup.com.
Inmon CIF: Bill Inmon and his colleagues defined the corporate information factory at the end of 1990s. This consisted of modeling the source systems commonly using the third normal form. All the data in the table was dated, which means that any changes in the data sources were inserted in the data warehouse tables. The following link gives more information on CIF: http://www.inmoncif.com.
Data Vault: Created by Dan Linsted in the 21st century, this is the latest and more efficient modeling method in data warehousing. It consists of breaking down the source data into many different entities. This gives a lot of flexibility when the data is consumed. We have to reconstruct the data and use the necessary pieces for our analysis. Here is a link that gives more information on Data Vault: http://learndatavault.com.

Cubes

In addition to the relational data warehouse, we might have a cube such as SQL Server Analysis Services. Cubes don't replace the relational data warehouses, they extend it. They can also connect to the other part of the warehouse that is not necessarily stored in a relational database. By doing this, they become a semantic layer that can be used by the consumption layer described next.

Consumption layer – BI and analytics

This area is where the data is consumed from the data warehouse and/or the data lake. This book has a chapter dedicated to data lake. In short, the data lake is composed of several areas (data ponds) that classify the data inside of it. The data warehouse is a part of the data lake; it contains the certified data. The data outside the data warehouse in the data lake is most of the time noncertified. It is used to do ad hoc analysis or data discovery.

The BI part can be stored in relational databases, analytic cubes, or models. It can also consist of views on top of the data warehouse when the data is suitable for it.

What is Azure Data Factory

Azure data factories are composed of the following components:

Linked services: Connectors to the various storage and compute services. For example, we can have a pipeline that will use the following artifacts:
- HDInsight cluster on demand: Access to the HDInsight compute service to run a Hive script that uses HDFS external storage
- Azure Blob storage/SQL Azure: As the Hive job runs, this will retrieve the data from Azure and copy it to an SQL Azure database
Datasets: There are layers for the data used in pipelines. A dataset uses a linked service.
Pipeline: The pipeline is the link between all datasets. It contains activities that initiate data movements and transformations. It is the engine of the factory; without pipelines, nothing will move in the factory.

Limitations of ADF V1.0

As good as ADF was, and although a lot of features have been added to it since its GA in 2015, there were a few limitations. At first, we relied on JSON quite a lot to define various ADF abstracts. The number of data stores and compute capabilities were quite limited.

The development experience is very different compared to V2.0. As shown in the following screenshot, we could use the Author and Deploy capability, but it only gave us JSON templates.

As we will see later in this book, the new V2.0 factory has a much better development experience.

When it came to source control, we had to rely on Visual Studio integration. From Visual Studio, we could create or import an existing factory and therefore, use the source control of our choice to version it.

What's new in V2.0?

With V2, ADF has now been overhauled. This section will describe the main novelties of ADF V2.

Integration runtime

This is one of the main features of version 2.0. It represents the compute infrastructure and performs data integration across networks. Here are some enhancements it can provide:

Data movements between public and private networks either on-premises or using a virtual private network (VPN). They were known as data management gateways in V1 and Power BI.
- Public: They are used by Azure and other cloud connections. There's a default integration runtime that comes with ADF.
- Private: They are used to connect private computer resources such as SQL Server on-premises to ADF. We need to install a service on one Windows machine in the private network. That machine can connect to the enterprise resources and send the data to ADF via the service installed on it.
SSIS package execution—managing SSIS packages in Azure. This is one of the main topics of this book. Chapter 3, SSIS Lift and Shift, is completely dedicated to this feature.

Linked services

Linked services now have a connectVia property to be able to use the Integration Runtimes that we mentioned in this chapter before. They can now connect to a lot more of data stores than it was possible before.

Datasets

Datasets are the same as they were in V1, but we don't need to define any availability schedules in them now. This means that they have more flexibility in their usage. In conjunction with Linked Services, the datasets have now access to a whole lot of new data stores: sources and destinations.

Pipelines

Pipelines have been modified quite a lot in V2. They don't have any windows of execution, with start times and end times. Pipelines can now be executed using the following technique:

On demand via .NET, PowerShell, REST API, or Python
Trigger:
- Schedule trigger: This trigger uses a wall clock kind of schedule, for example, a pipeline can be executed on a weekly basis every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:00 AM
- Tumbling window trigger: This works on a periodic interval, for example, every 15 minutes between two specific dates

Activities

Pipelines now have the following control activities:

Execute pipeline: Calls another pipeline in the same factory.
For each activity: Executes activities in a loop similar to any for each loop in structured programming languages.
Web activity: Used to call custom REST endpoints.
Lookup activity: Gets a record from any external data. The output can later be used by subsequent activities.
Get metadata activity: Gets the metadata of activities in ADF.
Until activity: Loops the execution of activity sets until the condition is evaluated to true.
If condition activity: This is like any if statement in standard programming languages.
Wait activity: Pauses the pipeline for a time before resuming other activities.

Parameters

Parameters can be used in pipelines. They are read-only values that are passed when the pipeline is executed manually or when they are scheduled to be executed.

Expressions

In V1, functions could be used to filter out dataset queries. In V2, expressions can be used anywhere in JSON-defined factory objects.

Controlling the flow of activities

Calling activities is more flexible in V2 than in the previous one (V1). As stated in the Pipeline section, there are many new activities, such as for each, if, until, lookup, and so on.

SSIS package deployment in Azure

There is now a new SSI runtime that completely manages clusters of Azure VMs dedicated to running SSIS in the cloud. Packages are deployed in the same manner that they are deployed on-premises when using the Azure SSIS integration runtime. SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) or SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) can be used to deploy SSIS packages.

Spark cluster data store

There are many more data stores available now.

Spark clusters are now available in V2. Since Spark is very performant and now integrates more functionalities, it has become an almost essential player in the big data world. In the previous version of ADF, Spark clusters were available via MapReduce custom activities. In this version, Spark is now a first-class citizen, so there will be no more headaches when it comes to integrating it in our data flow.

Description

ETL is one of the essential techniques in data processing. Given data is everywhere, ETL will always be the vital process to handle data from different sources. Hands-On Data Warehousing with Azure Data Factory starts with the basic concepts of data warehousing and ETL process. You will learn how Azure Data Factory and SSIS can be used to understand the key components of an ETL solution. You will go through different services offered by Azure that can be used by ADF and SSIS, such as Azure Data Lake Analytics, Machine Learning and Databrick’s Spark with the help of practical examples. You will explore how to design and implement ETL hybrid solutions using different integration services with a step-by-step approach. Once you get to grips with all this, you will use Power BI to interact with data coming from different sources in order to reveal valuable insights. By the end of this book, you will not only learn how to build your own ETL solutions but also address the key challenges that are faced while building them.

What you will learn

Understand the key components of an ETL solution using Azure Data Factory and Integration Services Design the architecture of a modern ETL hybrid solution Implement ETL solutions for both on-premises and Azure data Improve the performance and scalability of your ETL solution Gain thorough knowledge of new capabilities and features added to Azure Data Factory and Integration Services

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