Learning Guide for Azure Stream Analytics.

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What are Azure Stream Analytics?

Stream-Analytics-150x150Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed and hosted system that helps you to spot patterns in data as it enters your application in real-time with the data coming from any one of a number of different locations.

This makes it easy to build real-time analytic applications on data streaming from devices, sensors, web sites, social media, applications, infrastructure systems or anything which is network enabled and capable of pushing data to a location on the internet.

 

 

With a few clicks in the Azure portal, you can author what is known as a Stream Analytics job which specifies:-

  1. The input source of the streaming data (perhaps messages being sent from an embedded device or people posting on Twitter).
  2. What patterns of data you are interested in. This is done via a SQL-like language.
  3. The output location for the results of the analysis.

What can I use Stream Analytics for?

With vast amounts of data flowing over the network, an organization that can process and act on this streaming data in real time can make themselves more efficient and give themselves an edge over their competitors.

Common scenarios of the use of real-time streaming analytics include:

  1. Personalized, real-time stock-trading analysis and alerts offered by financial services companies.
  2. Real-time fraud detection.
  3. Data and identity protection services.
  4. Reliable input and analysis of data generated by sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects (Internet of Things, or IoT).
  5. Web clickstream analytics.
  6. Customer relationship management (CRM) applications issuing alerts when customer experience within a time frame is degraded.

So how do I get started?

If you have plenty of time, I suggest you start off with the offical Azure Stream Analytics Learning Plan which you'll find at:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/learning-paths/stream-analytics/

On the other hand if you only have smaller chunks of time available you could watch or read items from the following list (ideally in turn). I will keep this list upto date so it will probably change as new content is published and old stuff becomes less relavent etc.

Last update and review: 12th September 2016

 

Finally you can find more videos on Channel 9 at https://channel9.msdn.com/Search?term=stream%20analytics#ch9Search

Don't forget you can find the main document repository at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/services/stream-analytics/