Data Engineer Question and Answer

An aspiring data engineer recently reached out to me for some guidance on pivoting into the field from a software development background. The questions they asked are similar to what others have asked me in the past, so I decided to capture my responses here. I link to prior posts and other resources when possible… Continue Reading


Snowflake on Azure – Create External Stage

Snowflake, like similar analytic databases, has a fast way to load data from files. The COPY command can quickly read files and append the records to a table. It does this by reading from an external stage which points to a cloud storage location. This currently supports Azure Storage, Amazon S3, and Google Cloud Storage.… Continue Reading


Monitor Synapse Spark with Log Analytics

Log Analytics provides a way to easily query Spark logs and setup alerts in Azure. This provides a huge help when monitoring Apache Spark. In this video I walk through the setup steps and quick demo of this capability for the Azure Synapse Spark log4j output. I include written instructions and troubleshooting guidance in this… Continue Reading


Ingest tables in parallel with an Apache Spark notebook using multithreading

If we want to kick off a single Apache Spark notebook to process a list of tables we can write the code easily. The simple code to loop through the list of tables ends up running one table after another (sequentially). If none of these tables are very big, it is quicker to have Spark load tables concurrently (in parallel) using threads. There are some different options of how to do this, but I am sharing the easiest way I have found when working with a notebook in Databricks, Azure Synapse Spark, Jupyter, or Zeppelin.


Run SQL Server locally on Docker

I recently came across the need for a locally running SQL Server instance so that I could attach a database and deploy to Azure SQL. The windows 10 laptop I am using does not having SQL Server Developer edition installed yet, so I decided to set it up using Docker. What I like about using… Continue Reading