Category: Purview

Angela Henry continues a series on Azure Purview:

In our previous article for this series, Purview Part 2: Data Catalog, we examined the portion of the end user experience where people will spend the majority of their time. But the question is, how does that Data Catalog get populated? The Data Catalog is populated by the Scanning and Classification features of Purview, which is the focus of this article.

Click through to see what you need to set up and how the process works.

Wolfgang Strasser has some good news for us:

It’s been a long and intensive discussion – the (initial) pricing structure of Azure Purview. As I already talked about it in my Purview pricing blog post, the basic cost calculation involves

– the cost for the data map (= the infrastructure to store metadata and provide the Purview UI + cataloging functionality)

– plus the costs involved for scanning sources.

And that has added up to a significant amount of money, especially in dev/test scenarios. But read on for the glad tidings Wolfgang has to share.

Angela Henry gives us an overview of Azure Purview:

Organizations are amassing more data than ever, yet it is getting more difficult for their employees to find that data and use it with confidence. What if there was a solution out there that not only told us what data sources we have, but could tell us how those data sources should be used, and who the stewards/producers of that data are? What if it could allow us to classify our data, and provided us insights into what our entire data estate looked like? It might sound like data nirvana, but it just might be possible with the newest Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering from Microsoft, Azure Purview.

In the first part of the series, Angela covers the basics and pricing, so check it out.

Gauri Mahajan crosses the clouds:

Data exists in various types of formats and hosted in equally varied type repositories depending on the format of data. With the advent of the cloud, generally, every public cloud provider like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform provides a variety of data hosting avenues. A large-scale enterprise is very likely to have a multi-cloud footprint, where data is hosted on more than one cloud. As the data footprint on the cloud becomes larger, the need for a data catalog becomes increasingly important. Each cloud provider provides its format of the cloud-native data catalog. But even after employing a cloud provider-specific catalog, an enterprise may struggle to get a 360-degree view of data on the cloud. The reason being each cloud provider providers the ability to catalog data hosted on its own cloud only, which compels the end-users to reconcile or reference data from multiple catalogs, as the data catalog on the cloud may not integrate with cross-cloud data hosting services. As the client needs evolve, so do the cloud services. Azure Purview is the brand-new data catalog and governance-related service on the Azure cloud. It has introduced features to support cataloging data hosted on AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), which is typically considered the storage layer of data lake on AWS.

Read on to see how.

Wolfgang Strasser looks at a new feature in Azure Purview:

There was one big thing missing so far – the scanning of SQL Server / Azure SQL Views. Which – well – in many cases (customer databases) was a huge loss of information in the data catalog.

This known limitation is listed on the documentation page but many of us overread this sentence.

But check out Wolfgang’s most recent finding and it’s clear that the team is working on it.

Rahul Mehta takes a look at Azure Purview’s current user interface:

Metrics in Azure Purview are integrated and reported using Azure Monitor. Click on the Metrics section and it would have a link to Azure Monitor, which would open in a new tab as shown below. From this interface, we can filter and split different data metrics, plot the same on different types of graphs, as well as build custom dashboards to visualize the metrics to evaluate performance. The available metrics depend on the features enabled in the Azure Purview account. Metrics may have different levels of granularity and this may lead to a significant amount of data. The data generated can be aggregated in these dashboards using the available aggregation functions.

Click through for a quick walkthrough.