Few Azure Services went GA and we acquired a great visualization company - Datazen

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Pace of change in this world is so rapid, you blink and you can miss so many things. I just got back from an almost one month vacation and in that space of time, lots has been happening at Microsoft. Some of them that are data related is that we have had some Azure Services go general availability and we acquired Datazen.

Azure Services

  • Azure DocumentDB - DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL document database service that allows applications to query and process JSON data at scale.

  • Azure Stream Analytics - a Complex Events Processing (CEP) service that enables real-time insights over streaming data from devices, sensors, infrastructure, and applications.

  • Azure Premium Storage - Premium Storage stores data on the latest technology Solid State Drives (SSDs). Premium Storage is designed for Azure Virtual Machine workloads which require consistent high IO performance and low latency in order to host IO intensive workloads like OLTP, Big Data, and Data Warehousing on platforms like SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, and others. You can attach multiple disks to a VM and enable up to 32 TB of storage per VM with more than 64,000 IOPS per VM at low-millisecond latency for read operations.

  • Azure App Service -  enables developers to build web and mobile apps for any platform and any device. App Service is an integrated solution that streamlines development while enabling easy integration with on-premises and SaaS systems while providing the ability to quickly automate business processes.App Service includes the following app types:

    • Web Apps – Create mission critical Web apps that scale with your business.
    • Mobile Apps – Engage employees, partners and customers on any device at any time.
    • Logic Apps – Automate business processes across SaaS and on-premises.
    • API Apps – Easily build and consume Cloud APIs within any app.

    Azure App service is more than just for data related, however you can leverage the Logic Apps capability to say bring in data from Twitter, Salesforce, and other APIs into a SQL Database on Azure for example.

Datazen Acquisition

Microsoft recently completed the acquisition of Datazen and made this software available FREE to any customers with SQL Server Enterprise Edition version 2008 or later and Software Assurance. This means millions of people around the world will now be able to visualize and interact with data on their mobile devices, using the native mobile apps available at no charge at the respective app stores.

Datazen technology and solutions will complement Power BI, our cloud-based business analytics service, rounding out our mobile capabilities for customers who need a mobile BI solution implemented on-premises and optimized for SQL Server. Over time, we plan to integrate Datazen technology with Power BI to give our customers another hybrid bridge for their on-premises investment to the cloud.

Download link - https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=529426

The quickest way to get started is to download the Datazen app from your devices App store. Launch the app store and then search for Datazen and install the app. Once installed, launch it and you will be connected to Datazen's demo server which  will enable you to see how it is possible to make insights available to your mobile workforce.

Should you wish to try it with your own data, then you can quickly deploy the Datazen server into a Azure VM. See the following document for steps on how to do this - https://1drv.ms/1OSSltP (Note: this is only for quick demo./poc purposes and isn't a best practices guide, refer to manuals that are part of install package for that). I would also like to thank Chris Finlan at Microsoft for providing this great document.