Working with Azure to Use and Manage Data Lakes

Azure Blob Storage and Azure Table Storage

Azure Blob Storage and Azure Table Storage are both components of Microsoft Azure's cloud storage solutions, designed to store large amounts of unstructured and structured data. Each serves different purposes and comes with its own set of features, making them suitable for various use cases.

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage provides a platform for the secure and scalable storage of vast amounts of unstructured data, encompassing text and binary formats, accessible globally via HTTP or HTTPS. The term "Blob" refers to Binary Large Object encompassing a diverse range of data types, from images and videos to log files and backup archives. Its high scalability, robust security measures, and broad accessibility render it perfectly suited for a variety of applications, including the direct delivery of images or documents to web browsers, decentralized file storage, multimedia streaming, and the preservation of data for backup, disaster recovery, and long-term archiving purposes.

Key Features

• Scalability: Automatically scales to meet your application's demands, capable of storing petabytes of data.
• Durability and Availability: Offers high durability, storing multiple copies of your data in a data center. It also provides various redundancy options to ensure high availability and data protection.
• Security: Supports advanced security features, including network isolation, encryption at rest, and role-based access control.
• Access Tiers: Offers multiple access tiers (Hot, Cool, and Archive) to store data based on how frequently it is accessed, optimizing costs.
• Global Reach: Data stored in Blob Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over the web.
• Integration: Easily integrates with other Azure services, like Azure Functions and Azure Machine Learning, for processing and analyzing data.

Azure Table Storage

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL data store for semi-structured data. It is designed to store large amounts of data in a tabular format. Table Storage is a key/attribute store with a schema-less design. This means that each row in the table can have a different structure, with a different set of columns, and is identified by a unique combination of PartitionKey and RowKey.

Key Features

• Scalability: Highly scalable and capable of storing and serving many terabytes of data.
• Performance: Optimized for fast access to large volumes of data, with the ability to perform O(1) time complexity operations for data retrieval.
• Cost-Effective: A cost-efficient option for storing large amounts of structured, non-relational data. You pay only for the storage you use and the transactions you perform.
• Flexible Data Model: Supports a flexible schema-less design, making it easy to adapt your data as your application evolves.
• Security: Provides secure access through shared access signatures and encryption at rest.

Azure HDInsight

The Azure Data Lake is at the heart of the Azure Data Insight data warehouse service. Azure Data Insight can be a primary data source for queries, a cache for backup and protection against inconsistency, and an engine for working with the data stored in Azure Blob Storage and Azure Table Storage. Azure Data Insight includes the full suite of tools for:

• Hadoop-based computing infrastructure
• Integrated data warehouse
• Data integration and analytics services
• Visualizations and reporting services

Available in the cloud, the Data Insight service is a turnkey solution for large-scale data processing, analytics, and reporting.

In addition to Azure Data Lake and Azure HDInsight, the Azure Data Insight service includes the following built-in capabilities:

• Instant, persistent backups of Azure HDInsight clusters
• Auto-scaling to meet performance demands
• User-configurable and scale-out cluster support
• Discounted compute usage for development and test applications
• Logging for most applications and cluster storage
• Ability to pass log data to Azure Analyze
• Post-processing and dynamic analysis
• Integrated Data Science and Machine Learning services

Azure Stream Analytics – allows you to prepare and analyze streaming data in real-time with streaming and batch integration, as well as analytical integration with the Cloud Data Lake Service.

Anomaly Detection

The Analytics Dashboard (the heart of the Analytics D&I solution) provides actionable insight into your data by recognizing and automatically highlighting unexpected patterns and phenomena to drive actionable insight.

Remote Data Protection

Azure Data Lake protects your data by encrypting, splitting, and distributing it on your behalf and using TLS to protect all connections from your data center to the Internet. Azure Data Lake uses state-of-the-art cryptographic techniques to encrypt every layer in the data flow, thus keeping data out of the reach of criminals.

Data Governance

Azure Data Lake provides data governance services such as stream aggregators, deep linking, and built-in security policies. Azure Data Lake provides a unified, flexible, and scalable governance environment that fits a range of different data and analytic models, whether on-premises or in the cloud, with all the benefits that centralized management can bring.

Designed for use in any use case where you need to replicate continuously, process, analyze, and store large amounts of diverse and transient data, Azure Data Lake is a very flexible SQL platform and a real-time data platform.

Azure MapReduce

Azure MapReduce provides one of the most scalable and reliable parallel processing environments available today. A single vCPU unit can perform up to 500M similar MapReduce jobs, meaning one machine can simultaneously process 50 million map jobs, performing in an average of less than one minute per query.

Azure MapReduce supports both batch processing and streaming, and it supports all programming models, including SQL.

Azure Storage Gateway provides a managed storage connection between your on-premises datacenter and Azure SQL Database.

Azure Data Lake collects, stores, and handles various data types, allowing you to use the many available tools to make sense of your data. 

Depending on how you use it, Azure Data Lake offers flexible pricing with features that start at just $0.005/GB/day. You can begin with one-click integration with any of the existing SQL tools in the Azure Marketplace.

Summary

Azure Data Lake is the answer to the complexity of managing and processing large volumes of data. It allows you to run rich analytics with the speed and performance of SQL Server and the flexibility of Azure with all the benefits of a managed database service.

Based on Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Data Lake provides the flexibility to use a diverse and complex data set in your real-time applications. The solution is easy to install, easy to maintain, and with a proven track record of high reliability and uptime. Azure Data Lake provides strong support for data-sharing and migration of data from on-premises to the cloud, with a specific set of APIs to enable a wide variety of integration scenarios.

Azure Data Lake combines the best of SQL Server and Azure. It allows you to take advantage of Azure’s scale and performance and SQL Server’s flexibility.

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