As data volume and growth continue to rise, businesses are turning to data governance and data catalog programs to help them manage their data properties and create searchable self-service experiences. Azure Purview is a data catalog tool that provides users with access to a searchable catalog of business and technical assets.
In this recent webinar, presented by Senior Data Consultant, Steven Wise, and Lead Data Architect, Darren Zwonitzer, we explored the implementation process and how to resolve challenges in a secure environment. We also examined a few best practices, as well as lessons learned from various Purview engagements.
Additional topics covered:
How to install, configure, and secure a typical installation
How to customize and extend the business glossary
How to define and use custom classifications
How to use the API to add custom elements
If you are searching for a means to provide business and technical data users with self-service capabilities or starting a data governance program, then this webinar is right for you. You can watch the complete webinar below.
Need further help? Our expert team and solution offerings can help your business with any Azure product or service, including Managed Services offerings. Contact us at 888-8AZURE or [email protected].
Have you heard about one of the newest additions to Azure services, Azure Purview? This new addition to Azure services is currently in Preview and is a unified data governance tool that lets you easily create a map of your data landscape. I’m here to tell you more about Purview and share one of my favorite features.
In my video included in this post, I’ll walk you through a demo of how to utilize Azure Purview.
I’ll start with a view of a fictional data map. On that map, I have data centers and can group my data centers together.
I can also add many different data sources such as SQL Servers, Teradata, Hive Metastore, SAP, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure SQL Databases, Power BI, as well as others, and the list is growing every day.
It allows for classification of sensitive data and there are built in systems classifications, as well as create custom classifications. So, if you store bank routing numbers, for example, Purview already knows what that is and how it should be formatted. You can then apply this classification to that field in the data map.
An example for a custom classification might be in a Police Department, where you may want to have a classification for the computer-aided dispatch and case numbers. And almost every organization has a custom employee ID. You can create those classifications and find them in multiple systems by using the automated data discovery process.
Purview creates a catalog that is easily searchable by your business users. They simple enter in a term and the interface will show matches and suggestions for different assets and places they can find them.
In my opinion, the coolest feature is the data lineage. Here’s how it works:
In my demo I have an example of a Power BI Campaign Analytics dashboard. It we start at the dashboard and work our way back, we’ll see there are two visualizations, campaign revenue and digital campaigns.
We can see that those come from a dataset that is embedded in the Power BI workspace. It also shows that both datasets come from some final data that had a prep and transform associated to it, along with showing the five different data sources.
The benefit here is being able to show our users where the data comes from, what happens to it, where it ends up and how it gets used can help them to understand the complexity of the data.
I am a strong proponent of data governance, but few organizations do it as it seems like a giant undertaking. I feel it’s one of the most foundational activities an organization can take to increase their data literacy and IQ. That’s why Purview is so exciting! It allows businesses to easily start cataloging their data and will show immediate value to the stakeholders in the organization.
Need further help? Our expert team and solution offerings can help your business with any Azure product or service, including Managed Services offerings. Contact us at 888-8AZURE or [email protected].
I’m here with some exiting news from Microsoft! Last week at a digital conference, Satya Nadella announced the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics and the preview of Azure Purview, a unified data governance service. Azure Synapse Analytics has been gaining traction while in preview and adding Azure Purview gives businesses the ability to get the most of out their data and analytics.
Let’s talk about Azure Purview. This is a comprehensive data governance service that helps organizations discover all data across the organization. Demos at the digital conference showcased different ways you can use Purview for governance. Some key things are the ability to go multi-cloud, not only in Azure, but others as well. You can also connect with your on-prem environment and your Azure data assets.
For quite some time, those of us in the data disciplines have worked to inventory all the different aspects of data, like column, database and table names, etc., and put all those pieces into a common repository, often referred to as a data dictionary. Microsoft has been working for years to create a product that would be comprehensive enough to help most people with their governance and compliance needs. We’ve now got this with Azure Purview.
Some key highlights pointed out are:
A business glossary – no need to manually build a data dictionary.
Automated data classification – allows you to know things like data type (Social Security number for instance). You also have custom options and can schedule future scanning and classification on a routine basis. This way you’re getting continual updates, as opposed to a data dictionary where you get snapshot in time unless you manually update.
Cloud-based search facility – gives you the ability to find things quickly and easily across a broad series of data assets.
Data lineage and reporting – supports the end to end data lifecycle.
Power BI facilities
I feel Azure Purview is a very strong offering. Without it I would have either create my own versions of these pieces or using something like Embarcadero, which I used years ago. Another thing to note is that the experience is very similar to the canvas workspace experience in Azure Synapse Analytics, so if you’ve been working with that, it will feel very familiar.
The next part of Microsoft’s announcement is that Azure Synapse Analytics is now generally available. Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service which brings together traditional data warehouse and big data analytics in one offering. It brings these together for a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate machine learning and BI applications. I, and many of our customers, have been using this great product a lot, so this going GA is surely exciting news.
Some noteworthy things with Azure Synapse Analytics are:
A new native cloud distributed SQL engine
Deep integration with Spark
Flexible query options such as serverless and dedicated
Integration with Power BI and machine learning
TPC-H benchmark at petabyte scale
Native Row Level Security (this is not possible with Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery)
Native ML integration for the citizen data scientist
Code management – by that their talking about Azure DevOps as another piece that plays well with it.
Power BI integration to Teams which I found to be kind of cool
Again, great announcements with both the general availability of Azure Synapse Analytics and the public preview of Azure Purview. These two products combined empowers teams to remove data silos and leverage all data for analytics and data governance.
Need further help with these or any Azure product or service? Our expert team and solution offerings can help your business with any Azure product or service, including Managed Services offerings. Contact us at 888-8AZURE or [email protected].
Why are these announcements so important? Because to thrive, businesses need to harness the power of their data.
One of the best ways to harness the power of your data is to remove data silos. While not a new concept, achieving this has been a constant challenge in the history of data and analytics, as many ecosystems continue to be complex and heterogeneous. Organizations must break down all silos to the get the most out of data and analytics, in a consolidated, secure, and compliant manner. Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview remove silos by creating a unified data analytics and governance service.
Now that we’ve given you an overview of the announcements, let’s break down the details of each Azure service.
What is Azure Synapse Analytics? Azure Synapse Analytics is a limitless analytics service that brings together traditional data warehousing and big data analytics – into one offering! Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a centralized experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning applications.
Azure Synapse Analytics Highlights
New cloud native distributed SQL engine
Deep integration with Spark
Flexible service query options – Serverless + Dedicated
Power BI + ML integration
Azure Synapse Link – Enables real-time data analytics with link to your operational database
TPC-H benchmark at PB scale
Native Row Level Security – This is not possible with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery
Citizen Data Scientist capabilities with direct ML integration
Code Management – Automation, code sync to dev/master branch, and end to end deployment lifecycle
Power BI integration from inside the Synapse service
Ability to add Power BI reports into Teams for end users
What is Azure Purview? It is critical to enable these capabilities through a comprehensive data governance solution. An organization that does not know where its data is, does not know what its future will be. Azure Purview is a unified data governance service that helps organizations achieve a complete understanding of their data. Azure Purview empowers users to discover all data across the business, track lineage of data and create a business glossary wherever it is stored: on-premise, across clouds, in SaaS applications, or in Power BI.
Azure Purview Highlights
Key important and rich features: Compliance, Catalog and Data Map
Sourcing from on-prem, SaaS, and multi-cloud services
Data Map: search/browse data by tech/non-tech domain
Business glossary
No manual building of data dictionary
Data scanning by clicking on a button
Automated data classification with custom options
Schedule for future scanning and classification
Easy cloud based data search
Data lineage and reporting
Free scanning: On-premise SQL Servers, Power BI Service, data sensitivity labeling for O365 E5 customers
The combination of Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview enables organizations to develop the capabilities needed to empower their teams to leverage all data for analytics and data governance, silo-free.
