Azure just released a set of updates to Azure Machine Learning. Check out all the details here. There were three new launches: ...

Azure just released a cool new service call Azure Event Grid. Azure Event Grid manages all routing of events from any source, to any destination, for any application. It essentially puts events as first class citizens in the ecosystem. Built with a serverless model, it allows you to wire up eventing to perform “shoulder taps” when events happen to trigger downstream processing. ...

I wanted to spice up this blog a little bit with some intelligence. If you notice, on the left (or at the top), there is now a list of recommended articles you might like. This is driven by machine learning algorithms on the backend powered by the Azure Custom Decision Service. This service uses reinforcement learning to personalize the list of links based on your behavior. This means that other users reading the same article may see a different set of recommended articles. The service adapts the list of recommendations to maximize the overall engagement of users. ...

Azure Service Bus does support the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) 1.0 protocol. It is a comprehensive messaging protocol and is typically used where reliability and interoperability are key. It provides a wide range of messaging features such as reliable queuing, publish-subscribe, transactions etc. ...

If you have not checked out Microsoft’s qnamaker then you should. “From FAQ to Bot in minutes” - quite literally. You can sign up, give it an FAQ to ingest, wait a minute or so for it to train and then you will be given a REST endpoint to which you can POST natural language questions. You can quickly incorporate this into a bot using the Azure Bot Framework or even incorporate it into other web applications. ...

I have created a simple, proof of concept bot that leverages the following Azure services: Azure Bot Service Microsoft Cognitive Service – Text Analytics Microsoft Cognitive Services – LUIS Azure Search Azure Functions ...

You can use Azure SQL Data Warehouse as part of your Azure Data Factory pipeline which is great, but you probably don’t want to have the data warehouse running at the maximum Data Warehouse Units (DWU) all the time, especially if the pipeline is not running on a frequent basis. I want to share with you some steps to enable scaling up and scaling down of SQL Data Warehouse right within your Data Factory pipeline. ...

Recently a custom visual was released for Power BI that enabled browsing and analyzing collections of text. These visuals can provide a powerful set of tools for analysis. ...

Sometimes you have a requirement to get data out of Excel files as part of your data ingestion process. Perhaps the business users create reports in Excel and then send them to you on a regular basis. Unfortunately though, there is not always a great mechanism to extract data out of Excel files, especially if you want to use the data as part of a data processing pipeline with Azure Data Factory. In this post I outline an approach to leverage and extract data out of Excel files as part of an Azure Data Factory pipeline. ...

If you ever have a need to unzip a large number of files that are sitting in Azure Storage then one option is to use Azure Batch. In this post I will show how easy it is to create an application that leverages Azure Batch to unzip files sitting in Azure Storage and place the extracted files back into Azure Storage. A full working solution is available on my github repository here. ...