Core data concepts - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] A discussion about data platform the means and understanding of data in its relevance on today's business environment. So let's just start with that. Have you ever heard the saying that data is the new oil? Injecting, analyzing, in generating sites about your data it's one of the most crucial competitive edges a business can have however, Business Intelligence traditionally required expensive hardware, software licenses, and expertise to work with these landscapes has changed considerably over the past decade. Data is now much easier and cheaper to collect, store, and analyze making that considerably more accessible for small and mid-sized businesses. But what is data anyway? Data is a collection of facts such as numbers, descriptions, and observations used it decision-making. These data can be organized in three different ways is structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Let's start with the structure data this is typically tabular data represented by rows and columns in what we call the relational database. This is structure has been the most common way to represent business data on the past few decades in several database systems use a relational format including SQL Server, Oracle, Db2, and in MySQL they're quite useful when you know upfront the structure that the data will have we just call the schema. That being said in some business situations you might not know upfront how the data will be presented and you might need a less rigid way to represent that for these situations you might want to consider semi-structured data. Semi-structured data is information that does not rely on the rigid schema structure of a relational database but it still holds some structure to it. The most notable examples are the Extensible Markup Language XML, in the JavaScript Object Notation JSON formats. However, the past scope of decades brought a lot more formats of semi-structured data, such as key-value pairs and graph. You'll see these formats later on the course. Some of the technologies that work with semi-structured data include Azure tables, cosmos DB, MongoDB, and Cassandra. Finally, we have non-structured data which do not have any structure or searchable fields. These are the binary files that you have been using on your computer years, such as audio, video and image files. You generally need a specific program to open them such as Word, Excel or Adobe Acrobat. So it's not that easy to just square this data at scale as you do with structure or semi-structured data as for hosting this data you could use a file server, SharePoint align or a few other options in Azure such as Azure Files, Azure Data Lake, or Blob Storage. Blob stands for Binary Large Object. We'll also cover Azure options later on on this course.