Using AMQP with Azure Service Bus and Python

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. ...

July 5, 2017 · 2 min

Creating Context with Microsoft QNAmaker

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. ...

June 8, 2017 · 2 min

How To Build a Bot with Azure

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 ...

April 13, 2017 · 2 min

How To Scale Azure SQL Data Warehouse in Azure Data Factory

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. ...

March 6, 2017 · 2 min

Using Azure Functions to extract named entities from news articles

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. ...

August 14, 2016 · 3 min

Extracting data out of Excel Files using Azure Batch and Azure Data Factory

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. ...

May 14, 2016 · 4 min

Using Azure Batch to unzip large number of files

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. ...

April 23, 2016 · 7 min

Using Azure Functions to clean up Azure Data Factory

When you build out a pipeline using Azure Data Factory you will have to associate it to a storage account. If, as part of your pipeline you are running certain jobs such as a HDInsight On Demand job it will, for each slice run, generate a container in the storage account for that run. This is great for debugging, but if you run a pipeline for any extensive period of time these job containers build up and you need a way to periodically purge them. Typically you will see the adf job container be called something like: adfname_of_factory-name_of_ondemand_service-timestamp ...

April 20, 2016 · 2 min

Using Azure Resource Manager templates for deploying Drupal 7

This post is about automating deployment into Azure for Drupal 7. This will focus on leveraging Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and ARM templates to define the infrastructure as well as wire up the continous deployment processes. ...

October 4, 2015 · 5 min

Azure Resource Manager template apiVersion

September 10, 2015 · 1 min