Getting Started With Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Introduction

In this article, I am going to discuss the various concepts and then demonstrate the creation of the SQL Data Warehouse in an Azure Portal.

Requirements

Azure Subscription. If you don't have one, press this link to get a free trial subscription for 3 months.

What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse? 

The definition given by the dictionary is "a large store of data accumulated from a wide range of sources within a company and used to guide management decisions". As per the definition, these warehouses allow collecting the data from the various databases located as remote or distributed systems. It can be built by the integration of the data from the multiple sources that can be used for analytical reporting, decision making etc. SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based Enterprise application that allows us to work under parallel processing to quickly analyze a complex query from the huge volume of data. It is also a solution for the Big-Data concepts.

 

Let's get started and get our hands dirty!!!

Step 1

Sign in into the Azure Portal.

Step 2

 

Click "+Create a Resource" to create a new resource for an Azure SQL Data Warehouse in Azure Portal. Then select the "Databases" from the New blade, and choose the "SQL Data Warehouse" under a featured blade.

 

 

 

Step 3

It takes you to the xreation of the SQL Data Warehouse. Follow each step to create the warehouse without any problem.

1. Enter the desired name for your database. The database name should be unique because it's an identifier for your database. Then choose your desired subscription for your account. Create a new resource group for your resources because it's a storage folder for the resources that you created under this name. Choose the source to sample. It specifies loading the sample database in our warehouse because I use the sample data for demo purposes (otherwise you can choose the blank) and leave the sample database in AdventureWorksDW.
   
   
2. Now, click the server to create & configure the server for the data warehouse. Next click (3) Create a New server, it opens the (4) New Server form and fills out with the necessary information like Server name, Server Admin login, password and the location to establish a server at that place. (5) Then press create to create a Server.

 

 

Step 4

Then create a performance Level to allocate the performance required for the Data Warehouse. For our Data Warehouse, I choose Gen2.  To increase the requirements, adjust the slider to get the requirements. Then press Apply.

 

 

 

Step 5

 

Finally, we have completed the SQL Data Warehouse details, and click the create button to deploy the Data Warehouse in the Azure Portal.

 

 

Step 6 

After the successful deployment, It opens the deployed SQL Data Warehouse in the portal like this.

 

 

 

Conclusion

By the end of this article, you have learned about the usage and creation of a SQL Data Warehouse in the Azure portal without any problem. In my next article, I am going to describe the additional information about the data warehouse -- like setting up firewall rules, loading data etc.