Blogs or Expert Columns
Power BI
What is Power BI? Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights. Power BI dashboards provide a 360-degree view of business users with their most important metrics in one place, updated in real time, and available on all of their devices. With one click, users can explore the data behind their dashboard using intuitive tools that make finding answers easy. Creating a dashboard is simple, thanks to hundreds of connections to popular business applications, complete with pre-built dashboards to help you get up and running quickly. And you can access your data and reports from anywhere [...]
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning Azure Machine Learning is an integrated, end-to-end data science and advanced analytics solution. It enables data scientists to prepare data, develop experiments, and deploy models at cloud scale. The main components of Azure Machine Learning are: Azure Machine Learning Workbench Azure Machine Learning Experimentation Service Azure Machine Learning Model Management Service Microsoft Machine Learning Libraries for Apache Spark (MMLSpark Library) Visual Studio Code Tools for AI Together, these applications and services help significantly accelerate your data science project development and deployment. Open source compatible Azure Machine Learning fully supports open source technologies. You can use tens [...]
Azure Bot Service
Azure Bot Service: Azure Bot Service provides what you need to build, connect, test, deploy, monitor, and manage bots. Bot Service provides the core components for creating bots, including the Bot Builder SDK for developing bots and the Bot Framework for connecting bots to channels. Bot Service provides an integrated environment purpose-built for bot development. You can write a bot, connect, test, deploy, and manage it from your web browser with no separate editor or source control required. For simple bots, you may not need to write code at all. It is powered by the Bot Framework and it provides [...]
Azure Emotion API
Welcome to the Microsoft Emotion API, which allows you to build more personalized apps with Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based emotion recognition algorithm. Emotion Recognition The Emotion API beta takes an image as an input, and returns the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image, as well as the bounding box for the face, from the Face API. The emotions detected are happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, contempt, disgust or neutral. These emotions are communicated cross-culturally and universally via the same basic facial expressions, where are identified by Emotion API. Interpreting Results: In [...]
Azure Redis Cache
Azure Redis Cache: Azure Redis Cache is a distributed, managed cache that helps you build highly scalable and responsive applications by providing super-fast access to your data. The new Premium-tier is an Enterprise ready tier, which includes all the Standard-tier features and more, such as better performance, bigger workloads, disaster recovery, import/export, and enhanced security. Continue reading to learn more about the additional features of the Premium cache tier. Better performance compared to Standard or Basic Tier Better performance over Standard or Basic tier. Caches in the Premium tier are deployed on hardware which has faster processors and gives better [...]
Predictive Policing: The Future of Law Enforcement
The era of predictive analytics has arrived. And it has the potential to equip police departments and citizens around the world with the intelligence they need to predict crime both in real time and in the future. Thanks to everything from automatic license plate readers to gun sensors, the real-time data available to law enforcement agencies continue to skyrocket. And with Microsoft’s advanced analytics capabilities such as Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics, and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML), police departments now have the capability to predict when and where crimes will happen in the future. By building a crime analytics [...]
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database SQL Database is a general-purpose relational database service in Microsoft Azure that supports structures such as relational data, JSON, spatial, and XML. It delivers dynamically scalable performance and provides options such as columnstore indexes for extreme analytic analysis and reporting and in-memory OLTP for extreme transactional processing. Microsoft handles all patching and updating of the SQL code base seamlessly and abstracts away all management of the underlying infrastructure. SQL Database shares its code base with the Microsoft SQL Server database engine. With Microsoft's cloud-first strategy, the newest capabilities of SQL Server are released first to SQL Database, [...]
Azure Data Lake Store
Azure Data Lake Store Azure Data Lake Store is an enterprise-wide hyper-scale repository for big data analytics workloads. Azure Data Lake enables you to capture data of any size, type, and ingestion speed in one single place for operational and exploratory analytics. Azure Data Lake Store can be accessed from Hadoop (available with HDInsight cluster) using the WebHDFS-compatible REST APIs. It is specifically designed to enable analytics on the stored data and is tuned for performance for data analytics scenarios. Out of the box, it includes all the enterprise-grade capabilities—security, manageability, scalability, reliability, and availability—essential for real-world enterprise use [...]
Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Azure SQL Data Warehouse SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) that leverages Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) to quickly run complex queries across petabytes of data. Use SQL Data Warehouse as a key component of a big data solution. Import big data into SQL Data Warehouse with simple PolyBase T-SQL queries, and then use the power of MPP to run high-performance analytics. As you integrate and analyze, the data warehouse will become the single version of truth your business can count on for insights. Key component of big data solution SQL Data Warehouse is a [...]
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database. With the click of a button, Azure Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure's geographic regions. It offers throughput, latency, availability, and consistency guarantees with comprehensive service level agreements (SLAs), something no other database service can offer. Key capabilities As a globally distributed, multi-model database service, Azure Cosmos DB makes it easy to build scalable, highly responsive applications at the global scale: Turnkey global distribution You can distribute your data to any number of Azure regions, with the click of a [...]
Azure Event Hub
Azure Event Hub Azure Event Hubs is a highly scalable data streaming platform and event ingestion service, capable of receiving and processing millions of events per second. Event Hubs can process and store events, data, or telemetry produced by distributed software and devices. Data sent to an event hub can be transformed and stored using any real-time analytics provider or batching/storage adapters. With the ability to provide publish-subscribe capabilities with low latency and at massive scale, Event Hubs serves as the "on-ramp" for Big Data. Why use Event Hubs? Event Hubs event and telemetry handling capabilities make it especially [...]
Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Factory In the world of big data, raw, unorganized data is often stored in relational, non-relational, and other storage systems. However, on its own, raw data doesn't have the proper context or meaning to provide meaningful insights to analysts, data scientists, or business decision makers. Big data requires service that can orchestrate and operationalize processes to refine these enormous stores of raw data into actionable business insights. Azure Data Factory is a managed cloud service that's built for these complex hybrid extract-transform-load (ETL), extract-load-transform (ELT), and data integration projects. For example, imagine a gaming company that collects [...]
Azure Stream Analytics
Azure Stream Analytics Azure Stream Analytics is a managed event-processing engine set up real-time analytic computations on streaming data. The data can come from devices, sensors, websites, social media feeds, applications, infrastructure systems, and more. Use Stream Analytics to examine high volumes of data streaming from devices or processes, extract information from that data stream, identify patterns, trends, and relationships. Use those patterns to trigger other processes or actions, like alerts, automation workflows, feed information to a reporting tool, or store it for later investigation. Some examples: Stock-trading analysis and alerts. Fraud detection, data, and identify protections. Embedded sensor [...]
Azure HDInsight
Azure HDInsight Azure HDInsight is a fully managed, full-spectrum, open-source analytics service for enterprises. HDInsight is a cloud service that makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process massive amounts of data. HDInsight also supports a broad range of scenarios, like extract, transform, and load (ETL); data warehousing; machine learning; and IoT. What is HDInsight and the Hadoop technology stack? Azure HDInsight is a cloud distribution of the Hadoop components from the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). Azure HDInsight makes it easy, fast, and cost-effective to process massive amounts of data. You can use the most popular open-source frameworks such as [...]
Azure Recommendations API
The Recommendations API built with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning helps your customer discover items in your catalog. Customer activity in your digital store is used to recommend items and to improve conversion in your digital store.The recommendation engine may be trained by uploading data about past customer activity or by collecting data directly from your digital store. When the customer returns to your store you are able to feature recommended items from your catalog that may increase your conversion rate. Common Scenarios Supported By Recommendations Frequently Bought Together (FBT) Recommendations In this scenario, the recommendations engine recommends items that [...]
Language Understanding (LUIS) in Azure
Azure LUIS: Language Understanding (LUIS) allows your application to understand what a person wants in their own words. Azure LUIS uses machine learning to allow developers to build applications that can receive user input in natural language and extract meaning from it. A client application that converses with the user can pass user input to a LUIS app and receive relevant, detailed information back. Several Microsoft technologies work with LUIS: Bot Framework allows a chatbot to talk with a user via text input. Bing Speech API converts spoken language requests into text. Once converted to text, LUIS processes the requests. What is [...]
Amazon Machine Learning
Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) is a robust, cloud-based service that makes it easy for developers of all skill levels to use machine learning technology. Amazon ML provides visualization tools and wizards that guide you through the process of creating machine learning (ML) models without having to learn complex ML algorithms and technology. Once your models are ready, Amazon ML makes it easy to obtain predictions for your application using simple APIs, without having to implement custom prediction generation code or manage any infrastructure.This section introduces the key concepts and terms that will help you understand what you need [...]
Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex is an AWS service for building conversational interfaces for any applications using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, the same conversational engine that powers Amazon Alexa is now available to any developer, enabling you to build sophisticated, natural language chatbots into your new and existing applications. Amazon Lex provides the deep functionality and flexibility of natural language understanding (NLU) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) so you can build highly engaging user experiences with lifelike, conversational interactions, and create new categories of products. Amazon Lex enables any developer to build conversational chatbots quickly. With Amazon Lex, no deep [...]
Amazon ElasticSearch Service
Amazon ElasticSearch Service Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is a managed service that makes it easy to create a domain and deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch clusters in the AWS Cloud. Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and clickstream analytics. With Amazon ES, you get direct access to the Elasticsearch APIs so that existing code and applications work seamlessly with the service. Additionally, Amazon ES offers the following benefits of a managed service: Cluster scaling options Self-healing clusters Replication for high availability Data durability Enhanced [...]
Amazon RDS
What Is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)? Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration tasks. Overview of Amazon RDS Why do you want a managed relational database service? Because Amazon RDS takes over many of the difficult or tedious management tasks of a relational database: When you buy a server, you get CPU, memory, storage, and IOPS, all bundled together. With Amazon RDS, these [...]
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora Amazon Aurora (Aurora) is a fully managed, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, relational database engine. It combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases.Aurora makes it simple and cost-effective to set up, operate, and scale your MySQL and PostgreSQL deployments, freeing you to focus on your business and applications. Amazon RDS provides administration for Aurora by handling routine database tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair. Amazon RDS also provides push-button migration tools to convert your existing Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for [...]
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift System Overview Amazon Redshift is an enterprise-level, petabyte scale, fully managed data warehousing service. Topics Data Warehouse System Architecture Performance Columnar Storage Internal Architecture and System Operation Workload Management Using Amazon Redshift with Other Services An Amazon Redshift data warehouse is an enterprise-class relational database query and management system. Amazon Redshift supports client connections with many types of applications, including business intelligence (BI), reporting, data, and analytics tools. When you execute analytic queries, you are retrieving, comparing, and evaluating large amounts of data in multiple-stage operations to produce a final result. Amazon Redshift achieves efficient storage and [...]
AWS Data Pipeline
What is AWS Data Pipeline? AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that you can use to automate the movement and transformation of data. With AWS Data Pipeline, you can define data-driven workflows, so that tasks can be dependent on the successful completion of previous tasks. You define the parameters of your data transformations and AWS Data Pipeline enforces the logic that you've set up. The following components of AWS Data Pipeline work together to manage your data: A pipeline definition specifies the business logic of your data management. For more information, see Pipeline Definition File Syntax. A pipeline schedules and runs tasks. You [...]
Amazon Athena
What is Amazon Athena? Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL. With a few actions in the AWS Management Console, you can point Athena at your data stored in Amazon S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to set up or manage, and you pay only for the queries you run. Athena scales automatically—executing queries in parallel—so results are fast, even with large datasets and [...]
