Imagine, You are working with a large amount of structured data, semi-structured data, and unstructured data in your organization. Your organization has thought of moving into the e-commerce platform. You need to put the data in a place such that your entire data is easy to handle and analyze. Since your data is huge you need to adopt a service that provides you with instant results and one such service in Azure is Azure Data Explorer. In this article, let us understand Azure Data Explorer and its purpose in data analysis.
Azure Data Explorer(ADX)
The Azure Data Explorer(ADX) is a Big Data analytics platform that makes it easy to analyze high volumes of data in near real-time. The ADX toolbox gives us an end-to-end solution for data ingestion, query, visualization, and management.
Features of ADX
- Azure Data Explorer can handle a huge amount of data which can be in format
- It Provides instant results upon running queries with billions of records.
- We can detect patterns and anomalies in data.
- We can analyze the real-time data within a minute or less.
- We can also change the structure of data within no time.
A Step-By-Step Approach To Start With Azure Data Explorer(ADX)
Step 1: Before moving to the actual service, log in to your Azure portal which has an active subscription.
Step 2: Navigate to the Azure Services and click on the Azure Data Explorer clusters under the category of Analytics.
Step 3: Create a Azure Data Explorer cluster as follows.
Basics Tab
- Navigate to the Basics tab.
- Under the Project Details, mention the name of your subscription.
- Create a new resource group or use the existing resource group for your cluster and choose the region based on your requirements.
- Choose the compute specification account to your project requirements.
Scale Tab
- Choose the scaling method to scale your resource. Either you can choose Manual Scale method to manually scale your application or Optimized Auto scale method to scale up or down automatically.
You may leave the other tabs as default or customize them according to your requirements.
Click Review + create option you initialize the deployment of your resource.
Note: It takes 8-10 minutes of time to create your cluster
Step 3: Navigate to your resource once your resource deployment is completed.
Now, create a Database to store your data. Name your ADX Database and Specify the Retention period and Cache Period.
Step 4: Now, come back to your resource and click on Data Ingestion. Click on Ingest.
Complete the Authentication process with your credentials. Now you will be navigate to the Azure Data Explorer window. Create a table. Name your table. Click Next.
Choose the Format of your data which will be ingested and upload your file.
I have uploaded the file of .csv format with 5000 records. Now click Next.
Organize the data into the form of a table and create a schema accordingly. The only file formats supported are mentioned below. Choose the format according to your file and map the data to form a table schema.
Once the schema is created. Now, click next to create the Table according to your schema.
Step 5: Close the Table and Navigate to the Query Option. You can visualize the data under your Table.
Azure Data Explorer support KQL(Kusto Query Language). It is a much lower level language than SQL. Let’s Query the data and extract the details of the persons with the age greater than 25.
Output: Let’s visualize the output:
We can see that from the 5000 records of data we got 4200 records of data extracted with less than 1 second (0.516 seconds). This works with tables with billions of records in much lesser time and can execute complex queries.We can also perform operations on the data by exporting and integrating with various services.
Note: This article demonstrates the primary purpose of ADX. We can also integrate and export the data to other services and perform more complex operation on the data.
Azure Data Explorer – FAQ’s
Which Query Language Does Azure Data Explorer Use?
Azure Data Explorer use Kusto Query Language (KQL) which is much lower-level language compared to other Query languages.
What Type Of Data Can Azure Data Explorer Can Handle?
Azure Data Explorer can handle Structured, Semi-Structured and unStructured data including logs, time-series data etc.
Can I Integrate Azure Data Explorer With other Azure Services?
Yes, Azure Data Explorer can be integrated with Azure services like Azure functions, logic apps, Microsoft Power BI etc.
What Security Features Does Azure Data Explorer Provide?
Azure Data Explorer provide security features including encryption Azure Active Directory integration, Role based access control, auditing features etc.
Are There Any Best Practices For Optimizing Performance In Azure Data Explorer?
Yes, we can further optimize the performance of Azure Data Explorer by using partitioning techniques, Indexing and optimizing the Queries.