SQL of the North – An Update

It’s been almost a two year absence since my last post on SQLoftheNorth. Nothing sinister has happened at all, however I’ve been in a different role that didn’t allow for the deeper focus on data, analytics and related witchcraft that the blog required into order to write posts that are relevant for people in the field.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint!) , I’ll shortly be in a position to resume that deeper focus once again, and so I’ll soon be returning to blog duty posting all around developments, products and approaches from with the “Modern Analytics” domain. A lot has changed over the last two years – we’ve seen Synapse go GA, Power BI has evolved and evolved. We’ve got new terms like “Data Lakehouses” that are causing some interesting debates and many others.

I’ve picked a few areas I want to revisit past posts on too, such as Building the Data Warehouse-less Data Warehouse” and Power BI vs Analysis Services. These are all areas close to my professional heart, so I’m looking forward to going back to them with a 2021 lens and see how they differ and which is just the same stuff from years ago but with a fancier name…

The first proper post will be up soon – a nice little challenge I worked on with a customer using Azure Data Factory to extra data from the Microsoft Bookings API. In the current pandemic Bookings has seen a massive rise in use by organisations seeking to run remote consultations and similar meetings. On the back of this the need to extra data for reporting purposes is a key requirement. From my own research I couldn’t find a guide that covered this for Data Factory (but did for tools such as Logic Apps and Power Automate) so I’ve chosen to post on this one in the coming days.

Stay safe, folks.