Posted in: Microsoft SQL

Data Warehouse Efficiency

How quickly do you get from the business coming to you with "we need a data warehouse" to delivering that warehouse? If you've sat through any Biml talk, you've

Alexa Telemetry Data

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

Building our Alexa Skill Function

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

Building our Alexa Skill

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

Alexa Design Process

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

Alexa Solutions Infrastructure

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

Alexa Terminology and Documentation

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

Introduction to Alexa

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...

Posted in: Microsoft SQL

U-SQL: Automating Schema on Read

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

Posted in: Microsoft SQL

U-SQL and ETL Processing–Part 2

We’ve been going through a simple U-SQL script to perform some ETL processing in Azure Data Lake. Last time, we started by covering some basic syntax like variables and expressions. Now, we’ll pick up with some transformations. SSIS v U-SQL In traditional data warehouse ETL, we’ve been spoiled by th

Posted in: Microsoft SQL

U-SQL and ETL Processing

When you get started with Azure Data Lake Analytics and U-SQL specifically, you may get a little confused. It looks like a mash-up of T-SQL and C#. Turns out, That’s exactly what it is! You can find lots of information on MSDN, or GitHub, or StackOverflow. Let’s get started with...

Posted in: Microsoft SQL

Azure Data Lake Storage ACL Automation

In my last blog entry, we covered how to layout folders in your Data Lake Storage account based on a logical design. That’s only half the battle. You also need to set up Access Control Lists (ACLs). Setting up controls via the Azure portal is easy, but not something you...