Cloud, Big Data, and Business Intelligence are the three buzz words of the decade. Everyone is talking about them. Everyone wants to do it. But no one tells you how to do it. How do you use the cloud to process your big data and build intelligence around it to make business decisions?

There are multiple answers to that question, and in this guide, we tried to answer that question using Microsoft’s cloud solution (Azure) and Microsoft’s BI tool (Power BI) to get you started in the right direction.

Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud solutions providers, offering…

Azure Key Vault provides a great advantage of keeping your credentials, keys, and secret safe and centralized. However, the real power of the Key Vault sprawls in the seamless integration with various Azure components.

The primary benefit of referencing Key Vault secrets in Function Apps lies in enhanced security and reduced maintenance. The secrets can be updated in the Key Vault and are immediately available in the App.

This article will present few lessons learned while working with Key Vault references.

Caution: Microsoft Azure is a paid service, and following this article can cause financial liability to you or your…

Azure App Service provides built-in identity and authentication support, making user identification and authentication a hassle-free, low-effort task.

For ASP.NET 4.6 (and above) apps, ClaimsPrincipal.Currentis populated with authenticated user’s identities and claims, enabling developers to follow the standard .NET code patterns. However, in .NET Core-based Azure Functions, ClaimsPrincipal.Currentis not populated automatically and Claims must be obtained by different means.

This article will present four methods to access user identity and claims information in the .NET Core (C#) code.

Caution: Microsoft Azure is a paid service, and following this article can cause financial liability to you or your organization.

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Long gone are the days when a team of developers had to spent months setting up and debug the authentication for their apps and services. In the age of the cloud, almost everything is ‘plug-and-play.’

Azure comes with an in-built identity and authentication provider, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), so verifying and signing-in users is a minimal to no code task (aka “EasyAuth”).

This article will present a guide to setup and configure authentication for Azure Functions App to sign in users with Azure AD as the identity and authentication provider.

Caution: Microsoft Azure is a paid service, and following…

Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2016 (and later) supports an in-built feature for formatting query results as JSON. Then JSON support for Azure SQL data warehouse (currently Azure Synapse Analytics) was announced. Synapse Analytics supports querying and manipulating JSON data. However, there is no out-of-the-box support in Synapse to return SQL query results as JSON.

This article will create an HTTP triggered RESTful Azure Functions app with Node.js. This app will query Azure Synapse Analytics and convert and return the results as JSON.

Caution: Microsoft Azure is a paid service, and following this article can cause financial liability to…

Making Sense of Big Data

Azure Synapse Analytics SQL pool supports various data loading methods. The fastest and most scalable way to load data is through PolyBase. PolyBase is a data virtualization technology that can access external data stored in Hadoop or Azure Data Lake Storage via the T-SQL language.

PolyBase shifts the data loading paradigm from ETL to ELT. The data is first loaded into a staging table followed by the transformation steps and finally loaded into the production tables.

In this article, we load a CSV file from an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account to an Azure Synapse Analytics data warehouse by…

Azure functions offer a great way to store and reference credentials, keys, and other secrets as application settings. Application settings are exposed as environment variables during execution. Application Settings are encrypted at rest and transmitted over an encrypted channel. However, you still run the risk of inadvertently exposing these secrets to unauthorized users.

A more favored approach to alleviate this issue is to store the credentials or keys in the Azure Key Vault as secrets and reference the secrets as environment variables in our Azure functions apps.

This article will set up an Azure functions app to access secrets stored…

Azure Data Factory is a great tool to create and orchestrate ETL and ELT pipelines. The Data Factory's power lies in seamlessly integrating vast sources of data and various compute and store components.

This article looks at how to add a Notebook activity to an Azure Data Factory pipeline to perform data transformations. We will execute a PySpark notebook with Azure Databricks cluster from a Data Factory pipeline while safeguarding Access Token in Azure Key Vault as a secret.

Caution: Microsoft Azure is a paid service, and following this article can cause financial liability to you or your organization.

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