Cortana Intelligence – Overview of Information Management in Cortana Intelligence Suite

In the previous article, we saw an Overview of Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite, what are the pillars of Cortana Intelligence Suite, and what business problems this suite can solve. In this article, we will look at the first pillar of Cortana Intelligence Suite – Information Management.

Information Management is the Data Ingestion step in the process of Transforming Data into Intelligent Actions. This step is similar to the Data Ingestion step in a typical Data Warehouse and BI Architecture.

Information Management is comprised of the following three Azure offerings:

• Azure Event Hubs
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure Data Catalog

In this article, we will look at an overview of each of the above three azure offerings.

To continue reading, catch the full article here: Overview of Information Management in Cortana Intelligence Suite.

Cortana Intelligence – Introduction to Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite

Cortana Intelligence (Formerly known as “Cortana Analytics”) has been gaining popularity in the past few months and more and more organizations are adopting this offering from Microsoft.

Cortana Intelligence is a suite of fully managed Business Intelligence (BI), Big Data, and Advanced Analytics service offerings from Microsoft in the Azure Cloud. In this article, let’s look at the following aspects of Cortana Intelligence Suite:

• Overview of Cortana Intelligence Suite
• How it is related to Business Intelligence and Analytics
• Architecture of Cortana Intelligence Suite
• Cortana Intelligence Suite Highlights
• Typical Use Cases of Cortana Intelligence Suite

To continue reading, catch the full article here: Introduction to Microsoft Cortana Intelligence Suite.

Tips ‘N’ Tricks – T-SQL – An Elegant way to CREATE or ALTER User Defined Views in One-Go in SQL Server for Easy Maintenance

We have seen the approach for creating or altering a Stored Procedure in SQL Server in One-Go for Easy Maintenance. In this post, let us look at how to CREATE or ALTER User Defined Views in SQL Server in One-Go so that it is easy to maintain the scripts.

Usual approach taken by developers is to check to see if the View Exists. If View Exists, drop it and then create it with updated schema/logic. If it does not exist, create the View. As discussed in the previous posts on Stored Procedure and Functions, here are the drawbacks of DROP and RE-CREATE/CREATE approach:

• Permissions associated with the object, like GRANT SELECT etc., are lost when we drop and re-create the User Defined Views.
• If ALTER VIEW Script is given during maintenance (to apply changes) then, different Script needs to be given while Creating the User Defined View (on a new environment or while re-building an existing environment) and while Modifying the User Defined View.
• If DROP VIEW and CREATE VIEW approach is used, then all the permissions previously present on the User Defined View need to be given again with the help of necessary scripts.

To address the drawbacks highlighted above, there is an elegant way of Creating and Modifying a User Defined View similar to Stored Procedures using a Single T-SQL Script and the same script can be executed multiple times on any environment – whether it is a new environment or an existing environment and you are applying some changes to the View.

Here is a sample script to CREATE/ALTER a User Defined View.

IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.vwEmployee') IS NULL
	EXEC('CREATE VIEW dbo.vwEmployee AS SELECT 1 AS ID;') -- Create dummy/empty View
GO

ALTER VIEW dbo.vwEmployee
AS
	SELECT
		EmployeeKey
		, FirstName
		, LastName
		, Title
		, EmailAddress
	FROM dbo.DimEmployee
GO

SELECT TOP 5 * FROM dbo.vwEmployee
GO
-- © Dattatrey Sindol (http://dattatreysindol.com

Let me know if you know of a better way to handle this. Would be happy to learn different ways of doing it.

Take a look at the other Tips and Tricks in this Series on Tips, Tricks, Techniques, and Shortcuts to Improve Productivity, and Design and Coding Skills.

Until next time, Happy Learning 🙂

Further Reading: Dattatrey Sindol (http://dattatreysindol.com)