Azure Databricks: A Brief Introduction

A short introduction to the Amazing Azure Databricks recently made generally available. Databricks is a Big Data service based on Apache Spark and supports Python, R, and SQL as well as many machine learning frameworks. This is a friendly introduction to this exciting technology. Learn about it now!

#azure #sql #databricks

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10 Writing steps to create a good project brief - Mobile app development

Developing a mobile application can often be more challenging than it seems at first glance. Whether you’re a developer, UI designer, project lead or CEO of a mobile-based startup, writing good project briefs prior to development is pivotal. According to Tech Jury, 87% of smartphone users spend time exclusively on mobile apps, with 18-24-year-olds spending 66% of total digital time on mobile apps. Of that, 89% of the time is spent on just 18 apps depending on individual users’ preferences, making proper app planning crucial for success.

Today’s audiences know what they want and don’t want in their mobile apps, encouraging teams to carefully write their project plans before they approach development. But how do you properly write a mobile app development brief without sacrificing your vision and staying within the initial budget? Why should you do so in the first place? Let’s discuss that and more in greater detail.

Why a Good Mobile App Project Brief Matters?

It’s worth discussing the significance of mobile app project briefs before we tackle the writing process itself. In practice, a project brief is used as a reference tool for developers to remain focused on the client’s deliverables. Approaching the development process without written and approved documentation can lead to drastic, last-minute changes, misunderstanding, as well as a loss of resources and brand reputation.

For example, developing a mobile app that filters restaurants based on food type, such as Happy Cow, means that developers should stay focused on it. Knowing that such and such features, UI elements, and API are necessary will help team members collaborate better in order to meet certain expectations. Whether you develop an app under your brand’s banner or outsource coding and design services to would-be clients, briefs can provide you with several benefits:

• Clarity on what your mobile app project “is” and “isn’t” early in development
• Point of reference for developers, project leads, and clients throughout the cycle
• Smart allocation of available time and resources based on objective development criteria
• Streamlined project data storage for further app updates and iterations

Writing Steps to Create a Good Mobile App Project Brief

1. Establish the “You” Behind the App

Depending on how “open” your project is to the public, you will want to write a detailed section about who the developers are. Elements such as company name, address, project lead, project title, as well as contact information, should be included in this introductory segment. Regardless of whether you build an in-house app or outsource developers to a client, this section is used for easy document storage and access.

#android app #ios app #minimum viable product (mvp) #mobile app development #web development #how do you write a project design #how to write a brief #how to write a project summary #how to write project summary #program brief example #project brief #project brief example #project brief template #project proposal brief #simple project brief template

Azure Series #2: Single Server Deployment (Output)

No organization that is on the growth path or intending to have a more customer base and new entry into the market will restrict its infrastructure and design for one Database option. There are two levels of Database selection

• a.  **The needs assessment **
• **b. Selecting the kind of database **
• c. Selection of Queues for communication
• d. Selecting the technology player

Options to choose from:

1. Transactional Databases:
2. • Azure selection — Data Factory, Redis, CosmosDB, Azure SQL, Postgres SQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Database, Maria DB, Managed Server
3. Data warehousing:
4. • Azure selection — CosmosDB
5. • Delta Lake — Data Brick’s Lakehouse Architecture.
6. Non-Relational Database:
7. _- _Azure selection — CosmosDB
8. Data Lake:
9. • Azure Data Lake
10. • Delta Lake — Data Bricks.
11. Big Data and Analytics:
12. • Data Bricks
13. • Azure — HDInsights, Azure Synapse Analytics, Event Hubs, Data Lake Storage gen1, Azure Data Explorer Clusters, Data Factories, Azure Data Bricks, Analytics Services, Stream Analytics, Website UI, Cognitive Search, PowerBI, Queries, Reports.
14. Machine Learning:
15. • Azure — Azure Synapse Analytics, Machine Learning, Genomics accounts, Bot Services, Machine Learning Studio, Cognitive Services, Bonsai.

Key Data platform services would like to highlight

• 1. Azure Data Factory (ADF)
• 2. Azure Synapse Analytics
• 3. Azure Stream Analytics
• 4. Azure Databricks
• 5. Azure Cognitive Services
• 6. Azure Data Lake Storage
• 7. Azure HDInsight
• 8. Azure CosmosDB
• 9. Azure SQL Database

#azure-databricks #azure #microsoft-azure-analytics #azure-data-factory #azure series

Learn NoSQL in Azure: Diving Deeper into Azure Cosmos DB

This article is a part of the series – Learn NoSQL in Azure where we explore Azure Cosmos DB as a part of the non-relational database system used widely for a variety of applications. Azure Cosmos DB is a part of Microsoft’s serverless databases on Azure which is highly scalable and distributed across all locations that run on Azure. It is offered as a platform as a service (PAAS) from Azure and you can develop databases that have a very high throughput and very low latency. Using Azure Cosmos DB, customers can replicate their data across multiple locations across the globe and also across multiple locations within the same region. This makes Cosmos DB a highly available database service with almost 99.999% availability for reads and writes for multi-region modes and almost 99.99% availability for single-region modes.

In this article, we will focus more on how Azure Cosmos DB works behind the scenes and how can you get started with it using the Azure Portal. We will also explore how Cosmos DB is priced and understand the pricing model in detail.

How Azure Cosmos DB works

As already mentioned, Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-modal NoSQL database service that is geographically distributed across multiple Azure locations. This helps customers to deploy the databases across multiple locations around the globe. This is beneficial as it helps to reduce the read latency when the users use the application.

As you can see in the figure above, Azure Cosmos DB is distributed across the globe. Let’s suppose you have a web application that is hosted in India. In that case, the NoSQL database in India will be considered as the master database for writes and all the other databases can be considered as a read replicas. Whenever new data is generated, it is written to the database in India first and then it is synchronized with the other databases.

Consistency Levels

While maintaining data over multiple regions, the most common challenge is the latency as when the data is made available to the other databases. For example, when data is written to the database in India, users from India will be able to see that data sooner than users from the US. This is due to the latency in synchronization between the two regions. In order to overcome this, there are a few modes that customers can choose from and define how often or how soon they want their data to be made available in the other regions. Azure Cosmos DB offers five levels of consistency which are as follows:

• Strong
• Bounded staleness
• Session
• Consistent prefix
• Eventual

In most common NoSQL databases, there are only two levels – Strong and Eventual. Strong being the most consistent level while Eventual is the least. However, as we move from Strong to Eventual, consistency decreases but availability and throughput increase. This is a trade-off that customers need to decide based on the criticality of their applications. If you want to read in more detail about the consistency levels, the official guide from Microsoft is the easiest to understand. You can refer to it here.

Azure Cosmos DB Pricing Model

Now that we have some idea about working with the NoSQL database – Azure Cosmos DB on Azure, let us try to understand how the database is priced. In order to work with any cloud-based services, it is essential that you have a sound knowledge of how the services are charged, otherwise, you might end up paying something much higher than your expectations.

If you browse to the pricing page of Azure Cosmos DB, you can see that there are two modes in which the database services are billed.

• Database Operations – Whenever you execute or run queries against your NoSQL database, there are some resources being used. Azure terms these usages in terms of Request Units or RU. The amount of RU consumed per second is aggregated and billed
• Consumed Storage – As you start storing data in your database, it will take up some space in order to store that data. This storage is billed per the standard SSD-based storage across any Azure locations globally

Let’s learn about this in more detail.

#azure #azure cosmos db #nosql #azure #nosql in azure #azure cosmos db

How to set up Azure Data Sync between Azure SQL databases and on-premises SQL Server

In this article, you learn how to set up Azure Data Sync services. In addition, you will also learn how to create and set up a data sync group between Azure SQL database and on-premises SQL Server.

In this article, you will see:

• Overview of Azure SQL Data Sync feature
• Discuss key components
• Comparison between Azure SQL Data sync with the other Azure Data option
• Setup Azure SQL Data Sync
• More…

Azure Data Sync

Azure Data Sync —a synchronization service set up on an Azure SQL Database. This service synchronizes the data across multiple SQL databases. You can set up bi-directional data synchronization where data ingest and egest process happens between the SQL databases—It can be between Azure SQL database and on-premises and/or within the cloud Azure SQL database. At this moment, the only limitation is that it will not support Azure SQL Managed Instance.

#azure #sql azure #azure sql #azure data sync #azure sql #sql server

Revealed: A ridiculously easy way to integrate Azure Cosmos DB with Azure Databricks

Buddy our novice Data Engineer who recently discovered the ultimate cheat-sheet to read and write files in Databricks is now leveling up in the Azure world.

In this article, you will discover how to seamlessly integrate Azure Cosmos DB with Azure Databricks. Azure Cosmos DB is a key service in the Azure cloud platform that provides a NoSQL-like database for modern applications.

As a Data Engineer or a Data Scientist, you may want to use Azure Cosmos DB for serving your data that is modeled and prepared using Azure Databricks or you may want to analyze the data that already exists in Azure Cosmos DB using Databricks. Whatever your purpose simply follow this 3 step guide to get started.

What is Azure Cosmos DB?

For the uninitiated, Azure Cosmos DB worthy of the name is Microsoft’s multi-model database that can manage data at a planet-scale. It belongs to the “NoSQL Database as a Service” stack like its counterpart AWS DynamoDB.

Inside Cosmos DB, each piece of data called an item is stored inside schema-agnostic containers, which means that you don’t need to adhere to any particular schema for your data.

Cosmos DB supports multi-model APIs like MongoDB, Cassandra API, Gremlin API, and the default Core SQL API.

The Core SQL API provides you with JSON like NoSQL document store, which you can easily query using an SQL-like language.

Despite its fancy name and overwhelming features, Cosmos DB is basically a data store, a data store that we can read from and write to.

Through its seamless integration with a plethora of Azure services, Azure Databricks is just the right tool for the job.

In order to execute this exercise you must have an Azure subscription with Cosmos DB and Databricks services running. If you don’t have one, follow the steps below to get it and create the services for Free!

If you have an existing Azure subscription skip to the next section.

**If you do not have an Azure subscription **get a free trial here, it’s quite easy and takes less than 2 minutes. (you will need to give your credit card information, but don’t worry you will not be charged for anything)

Now, all we need is a Cosmos DB account and a Databricks workspace.

How to Create Azure Cosmos DB?

Microsoft makes it easier and easier to deploy services on Azure using quick starter templates.

Follow the link to the quick starter template to deploy Azure Cosmos DB, click on **Deploy to Azure, **this opens up the Azure portal on the browser. Review the steps and create your service. The Cosmos DB account will be ready before your next cup of coffee

Once the account is created you will need to create a database and a container in which your data will be stored. Follow the example below to create a Database called AdventureWorks and a Container named ratings.

Navigate to your deployed Cosmos DB account and click on Data Explorer →New Container → name your database AdventureWorks →your container **ratings **→ Partition key as **/rating → **select **Throughput manual **and set it to 1000.

#data-science #big-data #cloud #azure #azure cosmos db #azure databricks