LII:Delivering a Data Warehouse in the Cloud

Title: Delivering a Data Warehouse in the Cloud

Author for citation: Theresa Iserman and Scott Klein, Microsoft

License for content: Unknown

Publication date: 2019

This is a Microsoft-created course that is released on the edX platform. The self-paced six-week course is designed to help learners "learn how to deploy, design, and load data using Microsoft's Azure SQL Data Warehouse." The course is free to take, with a Verified Certificate of completion available for $99. The course requires on average two to three hours a week of effort.

The edX course description:

"In this course, you’ll learn theory and techniques for:

Choosing a massively parallel processing architecture for a cloud-based data warehouse.
Designing tables and indexes to efficiently distribute data in tables across many nodes.
Loading data from a variety of sources, querying using PolyBase, securing and recovering data, and integrating into Big Data environments."

About the authors

The edX instructors are Theresa Iserman, SQL Server Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft, and Scott Klein, Microsoft CTO. Iserman is a "trusted technical advisor, trainer, & troubleshooter and supports Microsoft’s enterprise customers in optimizing their SQL Server implementations," while Klein, CTO of cloud and related devices, is "a lover of data, analytics and IoT."

General layout and contents of the course

The pre-enrollment syllabus indicates that the first module deals with an introduction to Azure SQL Datawarehouse and massively parallel processing. The second module delves into table design, elastic queries, and associated tools. Module three "covers loading data into SQL DW with Azure Data Factory, Polybase, and Azure Stream Analytics. It also covers integrating with Azure Machine Learning, and visualizing data with Power BI." The fourth module discusses data warehouse management, including security and scaling. A final exam is given afterwards.