Go on, build apps with Microsoft Graph...

Microsoft SQL Server is for accessing data and Microsoft Graph is to access the myriad of things that are not really part of the database. The thing that spring to the mind are thins like, emails; your devices; the teams you work with; calendars; files; messages, peoples etc..

Also read this post on Graph databases:

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2013/12/what-is-neo4j.html

A quick look at this image shows how Microsoft Graph is positioned.

Well, what is it Microsoft good for?

Believe me, you indeed have a great deal of use for it. Allow me to quote Microsoft:
'
Looks at your next meeting and helps you prepare for it by providing profile information for attendees, including their job titles and who they work with, as well as information on the latest documents and projects they're working on (pro-active, do diligence).

Scans your calendar, and suggests the best times for the next team meeting.

Fetches the latest sales projection chart from an Excel file in your OneDrive and lets you update the forecast in real time, all from your phone.

Subscribes to changes in your calendar, sends you an alert when you’re spending too much time in meetings, and provides recommendations for the ones you could miss or delegate based on how relevant the attendees are to you.

Helps you sort out personal and work information on your phone; for example, by categorizing pictures that should go to your personal OneDrive and business receipts that should go to your OneDrive for Business.
'
Behind Microsoft Graph is the Microsoft Graph API; a RESTful web api that enables you to access Microsoft Cloud serivce resources.
Come back to this blog again for more on Microsoft Graph.

Go here and gets started:

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/concepts/get-started

Microsoft has done quite well, don't you think?

Cloud and Big Data has made a lot of changes...

Big Data exposure with Oracle and Microsoft

The above title and the below paragraph is from the following link:
http://www.valuewalk.com/2014/07/oracle-corporation-orcl-launches-big-data-sql/

"Moerdler rates Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) as Outperform, giving it a $49 price target (currently $41) based on a 12-month adjusted EPS estimate of $3.58, a 13x PE multiple, and adding back in net cash per share discounted by 30%"
Current: $50.14 (7/2/2017)

"He also argues that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is a good Big Data play, rating it Outperform and giving it a $56 price target (currently $43.50), because he believes management is heavily focused on mobile and cloud products and that EPS growth is going to pick up as the company moves its focus away from the slowing PC market"

Current: $68.93 (7/2/2017)

After a 3 year period of many political and economic changes Microsoft seems to have outformed Oracle which may be attributed to its all out effort and emphasis on Cloud Services not withstanding its PC and Phone performance.

Hands-on Learning Event in Honolulu 1 : Introduction to Structured Query Language

The above course will be offered again (April 14-May 17, 2016) as a non-credit course by the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training.

Course summary:

Databases, organized repositories of information, have become indispensable and in fact even more relevant despite the emergence of Big Data in today's world.

In this introductory course you will learn about relational databases and the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL) including sorting; grouping result sets; using DDL, DML, DCL, and TCL. All SQL statements will initially be written for one table. Most practical, modern and relational databases will include a large number of tables and SQL queries have to access information from several tables. This course will then introduce you to querying more than one table. With this skill you will be able to query two or more tables in a database. This is a hands-on course which will take you from installing SQL Server 2012; learning the ins and outs of SQL Server Management Studio and of course a full dose of SQL.

During each meeting the students will be assessed for their knowledge, competency and proficiency in SQL.

New this session:
SQL Azure Database: SQL Server in Microsoft Cloud
Windows PowerShell for SQL Server

My sincere thanks and best wishes to the January batch of students.

Microsoft's R Server Developer Edition is FREE

Data is dead long live analytics.

Analytics will be the beacon to follow by all enterprises in the future. Having mere data and not being able to act on it is something that everyone will rush to avoid. R language, a language meant for statisticss and analytics will be one of the most sought after skills in the near future.

Microsoft has thrown in a lot to be at the forefront, not only acquiring the Revolution Analytics Company but also making it one of the prime features of SQL Server 2016.

Microsoft will be rebranding Revolution Enterprise for Hadoop, Linux and Tera data as R Server.
If you are interested in this growing technology area you could jump start downloading the R Server Developer Edition which is free (as free can be). It's just like all the other developer's stuff, has all the features of enterprise but not production worthy.

Also Revolution R Open has been rebranded as Microsoft R Open which is also free. For those who are already using MicrosoftData Science Virtual will have a preinstalled R Server. It is not a stretch that R Server will be on Azure as well for machine learning and IOT.

Download R Server here.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2016/01/12/making-r-the-enterprise-standard-for-cross-platform-analytics-both-on-premises-and-in-the-cloud.aspx

Read more here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/

Students following an acdemic course will be benefitted with the Microsoft DreamSpark Program .

SQL evolves to U-SQL, language under development at Microsoft

While SQL covered the RDBMS landscape U-SQL covers a much larger data landscape.

At the same time as the announcement of Azure Data Lake Services, a new language under development at Microsoft, the U-SQL language was also announced. For the Azure Data Lake Service and what it means to business read here.

With the advent of Big Data and the task of mining all kinds of data, RDBMS suddenly found itself at a disadvantage. Structured Query Language (SQL) could only address what is in a relational data store. U-SQL was born to address this challenge posed by Big Data defined by volume, velocity and variety.

What is U-SQL
U-SQL deep dives into Big Data to extract the most relevant information. It is a powerful language (in the words of Microsoft):

• Process any type of data. From analyzing BotNet attack patterns from security logs to extracting features from images and videos for machine learning, the language needs to enable you to work on any data.
• Use custom code easily to express your complex, often proprietary business algorithms. The example scenarios above may all require custom processing that is often not easily expressed in standard query languages, ranging from user defined functions, to custom input and output formats.
• Scale efficiently to any size of data without you focusing on scale-out topologies, plumbing code, or limitations of a specific distributed infrastructure.

Compared to HIVE, a SQL-Based language U-SQL is flexible and does not have the limited capability to address the 'variety' in non-structured data requiring schema generation prior to running queries. U-SQL should prove more easy to use than Hive for complex scenarios.

U-SQL has been designed as declarative SQL based language with native extensibility through user code in C#. This approach:

• Unifies SQL and C#
• Unifies structured and Unstructured
• Unifies declarative and custom code

U-SQL is based on SCOPE which is based on  existing prior languages, ANSI-SQL, T-SQL and HIVE. U-SQL should present a less steeper curve for those who are using SQL already.

U-SQL is an important development that developer need to jump on.

Big data, Analytics, AI addressing Oncology questions

AI recently has come to the forefront gaining notoriety as the harbinger of 'Killer Robots'.
AI at its core is machine intelligence and IBM has worked on AI since the early days of AI. We all remember the movie Space Odyssey 2001 where the computer HAL 9000 could not only understand natural language but was also able to read lips.

AI cannot be all that bad and it can be most useful in answering questions of great importance, fast and accurate based on knowledge.

IBM's Watson products (Watson for Oncology, Discovery Advisor and Engagement Advisor) are based on harvesting massive amount of information and digesting them and putting them to good use by charting out actions. The information comes from many different sources structured, unstructured  depending on the question Watson has to answer.

Watson for Oncology is a smart software product for medicine and the AI training has been received at Sloan Kettering and is able to deliver answers to oncology related questions and help doctors to find the most efficacious treatment options. It does to by cross-referencing the patient information against massive medical databases; curated texts from medical conferences, articles and other announcements. 

Cancer treatment has moved away from generic to customization.

Here is Watson for Oncology from the IBM Site.

Microsoft Ignite 2015 is announced

It is just now announced for 2015 between 4 th and 8th of May in Chicago,IL. Microsoft Ignite is about addressing the fast changing technology; it is about innovation in this rapidly changing and extremely mobile technology arena that is going to make seismic changes in our lives. Microsoft Ignite is the meeting place where the sharpest of the cutting edge in innovation be it Big Data; be it IoT or something quite out of the blue is discussed.

It is also about learning, certification, compliance, deployment, security and all the different things needed to make the push needed to take your skills to the next level.

There are veteran Microsoft speakers ready to make your experience productive and enjoyable.
Read more about Microsoft Ignite here (and register for the event) and revisit as the content of this event develops:
http://ignite.microsoft.com/#fbid=xLhDyuK-AHn

Big Data Generation 2: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire

2012 marked the year when Higgs Boson (aka Higgs Particle predicted in 1964)  was discovered at CERN. In order to get to this, immense research was undertaken spanning many years of hard work.

One of the main challenges is the data storage of the immense amount of data that is gathered every second, non-stop. The other challenges are how to make this data available to 1000's of scientists globally and how to find the rarest of events that is hidden in this immense amount of data. This is clearly the area of what we call 'Big Data'.

Big data is generated here and federated across the World.

"CERN’s 17-mile-long collider generates hundreds of millions of particle collisions each second. Recording, storing and analyzing these collisions represents a massive challenge; the collider produces roughly 20 million gigabytes of data each year. CERN stores that data partly on the premises in Geneva, but has to distribute roughly 80% to data centers all around the world. So far, CERN has amassed about 200 petabytes of data."

The above is quoted from here,
Trends in Big Connectivity: Higgs Boson & the Science of Big Data

CERN’s Big Data processing relies on the Hadoop Distributed File System for storing massive amounts of data.

Huawei plays a big role in facing this data storage challenge with its cloud / storage solutions. Follow the details here

http://enterprise.huawei.com/en/search/index.htm?ssUserText=cern

CERN relies on NetApp Storage solutions.
Watch this NetApp Video:


About CERN:
It is too well known that needs an introduction, but if you have missed here is an intro and a video from CERN.

Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research's main field of activity is Particle Physics. The physics to understand the building blocks of this universe and how they interact.

It should be noted that the World Wide Web (the first scripted) was invented by Berners-Lee in 1989 also at CERN.
http://home.web.cern.ch/about
Here is a movie that tells you what CERN is about:
http://cds.cern.ch/video/CERN-MOVIE-2012-193

Big data to aid Big apple

Big data shakes hands with academics.

Big cities are sources of big data. Data comes in streams from all directions from diverse sources like traffic, crime, scams, events, emails, social media sites, weather sensors, sniffers of various kinds, parking lots and you name it. This data is not the kind of data that you can feed directly to a relational engine, it is diverse, a mélange and can only be termed informatics.

A new center, Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at New York University will be utilizing Big data to understand the dynamics of the city through various sensors and look through the data they bring in. Similar programs are already in place in University of Chicago and MIT. Outside USA similar efforts are in place like Spain and Singapore.

NYU will offer MS and PhD programs and takes an integrated look at physical, biological and informational data form the city's sensors. The data comes from not only installed sensors to measure temperature, pollution etc.  but also from body worn sensors like FitBit, and Up wristbands that volunteers wear and go round the city. Of course data from twitter feeds, blogs, video cameras etc. will be integrated as well.

Well there is no dearth for data from such a large resource as Big Apple.

The program has sponsors committed to Big Data with biggies like Microsoft, IBM, Xerox, City agencies, MTA and a couple of National Laboratories thrown in for good measure.

This post was written after reading this article, ‘Smart Cities will need big data’ in Physics today a journal published by the American Physical Society, September 2013, pp. 19, 20. For details get a copy of the journal from a library near you.

Related resources (Please do not skip):

http://cusp.nyu.edu/

Watch this video:

http://cusp.nyu.edu/the-promise-of-urban-informatics-video/

http://www.dw.de/smart-city-santander-takes-lead-in-europe/a-16945649

http://senseable.mit.edu/livesingapore/