Analytics has taken on a new meaning as far as my insights have been the last 10-20 years. It used to be so simple: take an application, access the data and write a report. This could all be done in VB (or BW – before the web). Changing out an application was very difficult and keeping data for more the 5 years was unheard of.

This rapidly changed in the last 10 years, and looks to keep changing more rapidly in the next 3 years. I remember when someone would ask me ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?’ I would change that to ‘Where do you see your skills in the next 2-3 years?

The title here is a little misleading, because this blog is not going to cover ALL analytics in MS Azure. It is to get your attention to how open ended this concept is today. And, how quickly it will change. The point I am trying to make is to express in this blog (there will be more) what I am starting learn about analytics in Azure.

Data
Data is the key to any analytics topic. But where is the data coming from? That is a question the business has changed in the last 5-10 years. Today it is here, tomorrow is it over there plus the vendor decided to use a JSON structure in a relational database table. I always tried to place the data (data warehouse for reporting) in a SQL Server database because, well because that is the ‘best place’ to put it, right? Well, that was all I knew and it was the ‘skill’ I was going to maintain till the end…

Infrastructure
Today, I see the difficult data stores for on-premises availability, more available in the cloud. Hadoop seemed like a difficult system to support, but the cloud assists. Then, they show me the neat things you can do in this cloud infrastructure with reduced costs and quicker uptime.

Interface
Then, ‘querying’ the data seemed difficult, then the cloud fixed that. I can even write ‘SQL’ to get data. By placing a schema on top, 3rd party tools are virtualizing the un-/semi-structured data. They even have ‘indexes’ and query plans.

Visualize
Yep, fixed in the cloud – notebooks. That is a very simple answer…more to come

In summary, Azure has taken and is taking difficult tasks for getting things ‘running’ and making them easier to use. Now, there are some complicated stuff like security, which I just read a tweet about, that really needs some work. But we have faith it will get ‘less’ complicated.