February 2018. Azure Data Factory v2 is officially generally available. After a preview that stretched through 2016 and 2017, the thing is real now. So what does GA actually mean for the people who've been running it in production already? What GA Actually Delivers Three things change with
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
When you build an Alexa skill you’ve got two rich sources of information describing how users are interacting with your skill. The first is the data in the Alexa Skills Kit request object. The request object is the JSON representation of what you said to your Alexa device. Alexa Voice...
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
In putting together the demo for this blog, I found there is an issue when saving data to the Alexa Session data. I can't reliably write to this collection in
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
Currently, there are two ways we can construct our skill. You can use the Amazon developer portal, or you can use the Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
Let's start designing our Receptionist skill. The purpose of this skill will be to help visitors who come in for meetings alert the employee they're meeting
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
With an understanding of the Alexa ecosystem and some of the terminology I’ll be using, let’s look under the hood a bit today. All Alexa devices depend on the cloud to do the heavy lifting. In the most simplified case, this is what’s under the hood of a simple Alexa...
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
n my last article, I introduced the hardware, the differences between the Alexa Voice Service (speech recognition and language understanding) and the Alexa Skills Kit (new and interesting abilities you can create for the Alexa ecosystem). I also covered four current skills categories. Today let’s co
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
When I received the first pre-order email for an Amazon Echo in late 2014, I was excited by this new technology. I pre-ordered right away. The Echo became the first of many devices that tied into the Alexa Voice Service (AVS). This voice service encapsulates both speech recognition as well...
I've been using Microsoft data tools professionally since SQL Server 2000. SSIS since 2005. Azure Data Factory since 2014. That's long enough to recognize a pattern in how Microsoft ships products, and long enough to have an opinion about what that pattern costs the people who
Kubernetes 1.8 shipped last month. The container orchestration war is effectively over — Kubernetes won. And while the immediate data engineering story isn't "run all your Spark jobs on Kubernetes starting today," the container model it's standardizing around changes the deployment story for data
There's a distinction worth making explicit before going further with Great Expectations: data quality monitoring and data testing are related but not the same thing. Conflating them leads to setting up the wrong tool for the job — or expecting too much from the right tool. Data Quality Monitoring
Posted in: Microsoft SQL
Moving to U-SQL for your ETL can feel like a step back from the drag and drop functionality we have in SSIS. But there is one great thing about your ETL being