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Category: Architecture

Synapse Database Templates GA

Kevin Schofield makes an announcement:

We’re pleased to announce today that Synapse Database Templates are now Generally Available and that we are also making available three additional Synapse Database Templates for Healthcare Insurance, Healthcare Providers, and R&D and Clinical Trials.

The Healthcare Insurance template is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations providing insurance to cover healthcare needs (sometimes known as Payors).

The Healthcare Providers template is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations providing healthcare services.

The R&D and Clinical Trials template is a comprehensive data model that addresses the typical data requirements of organizations involved in research and development and clinical trials of pharmaceutical products and devices.

Read on to learn more about how these templates work and what you can do with them.

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Imagining a SaaS Plane for Data Mesh in Azure

Paul Andrew shares some deep thoughts:

For part 7 of this series, I want to explore what else could be delivered in our Azure Data Mesh if we continue our established thinking around the planes of interaction for our data products. As with part 6, we are still missing good Azure Resources that can deployed for certain situations. However, I want to frontload some concepts now, so we are ready if/when a suitable technical answer arrives in the cloud.

Note that this is all speculative. It’s interesting speculation, though.

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Well-Architected Framework for IoT

Ben Brauer announces the Well-Architected Framework for IoT devices on Azure:

The IoT workload guidance outlines the core principles that facilitate a well-architected IoT solution and provides recommendations for each of the 5 pillars of the Well-Architected Framework. This guidance highlights the key considerations and high-level principles for an IoT workload, design considerations to help you enable those principles, and tradeoffs to consider in order to meet your business goals.

Despite its overloaded acronym, I like the Well-Architected Framework as a way of making sure that you are implementing a solution in Azure the right way.

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Thinking Azure Data Platform Security Architecture

Craig Porteous begins a new series:

Reference architectures are great! You’ve got all of the key components in there, nice and clear. Colourful lines showing how data moves through each stage, product, or service. Great for a slide deck or a proposal to get rid of that old creaking data warehouse and into a shiny new Data Lakehouse.

Not so great for the finer details demanded by security operations teams however.

This promises to be an interesting series.

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Making Daily Standups Worthwhile

Amit Nair has some advice:

 A Big No to technical discussions

This is the first reason why Daily scrum meetings take more than 15 mins. We can understand that Scrum Team needs to discuss the technical issue when they face one during the execution of a task. These technical issues need to be reported to Scrum Master as an obstacle or impediment, which need to be resolved later on not when the meeting is in progress.  

This is generally sound advice, especially because the idea of a daily standup is to together, quickly discuss plans and activities relating to the sprint, and make the team aware of blockers. Going beyond that is typically unnecessary. As teams get smaller, you can be a bit more lax with the rules; as you get closer to that 8-10 person team, you have to be pretty ruthless about keeping on time and on topic. Save the more detailed discussions for relevant meetings afterward.

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Azure ML Well-Architected Framework Review

Ben Brauer has good news:

Microsoft offers prescriptive guidance called the Well-Architected Framework that optimizes workloads implemented and deployed on Azure. This guidance has been generalized for most workloads and creates a basis for reliable and secure applications that are cost optimized.

We have begun to build on this base content set to include more precise guidance for specific workload types, such as machine learning, data services and analytics, IoT, SAP, mission critical apps, and web apps. Machine Learning was the first branch from the base content, which came into fruition in the Fall of 2021.

In case you have never used the Azure Well-Architected Review assessment tool, it’s really useful. It can take hours (or days) to go through the review but if you take it seriously and have the right people in the room giving answers, you’ll get concrete guidance on how to optimize your Azure-based solutions.

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Understanding Data Mesh

Rick Spurgeon has a video series:

Decentralized architectures continue to flourish as engineering teams look to unlock the potential of their people and systems. From Git, to microservices, to cryptocurrencies, these designs look to decentralization as a method of breaking apart centralized bottlenecks. Data mesh is an approach to data and organizational management centered around decentralizing control of data itself. In this post, we’ll look at a Confluent Developer video-led course that tackles the big concepts and walks you through creating your own data mesh using event streams and Confluent Cloud.

Click through for a 9-part video series.

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Summarizing Data Mesh in Azure

Paul Andrew wraps up a series:

When we consider this in the context of what I’ve already established in part 1 of the series, I focused on our data products and ownership. Now I want to re-introduce our data domains as a level above our data products. We can even consider this a hierarchy.

– Data Domains

– Data Products

Why?

Read on for that answer.

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From Access to SQL Server

Tom Collins has some tips to make an Access to SQL Server migration more successful:

-Access has a size limit of 2 GB

-Access has a concurrent users limit of 255 users

-Require increased capacity 

The SQL Server Migration Assistant for Access (SSMA) is a very useful tool  offered by Microsoft . 

The main objective of these notes is to supplement the Microsoft documentation and to assist in Access to SQL Server journey.      

Read on for those notes.

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Mission-Critical Azure Architectures

Ben Brauer has some reference guidelines:

The AlwaysOn project strives to address the challenges of building mission-critical applications by providing organizations with a prescriptive architectural approach for the Microsoft Cloud.

It leverages lessons from numerous customer applications and first-party solutions, and applies Well-Architected best practices to provide actionable and authoritative guidance for building and operating a highly reliable solutions on Azure at-scale.

I guess marketing is calling it “AlwaysOn” again. Until they call it Always On. Or AlWaYsOn.

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