Book Review – Scalable Data Analytics with Azure Data Explorer

I recently finished the book Scalable Data Analytics with Azure Data Explorer (Modern ways to query, analyze, and perform real-time data analysis on large volumes of data), written by Jason Myerscough. I got the ebook for a mere $5 at a Packt sale, but luckily the price is no indication of the quality. In fact, it’s quite a good book and a learned a lot about ADX. If you’re wondering with ADX is, it’s The Most Powerful Azure Service You’ve Never Heard Of. Patrick Leblanc (you know, from Guy in a Cube), Josh Luedeman, and Bradley Ball gave an interesting talk about it at SQLBits, and you can watch it for free on YouTube:

Azure Data Explorer (ADX) is the service that powers Azure Log Analytics and you can use it to query Azure Monitor data. You can also use ADX as a time-series database either in the service itself, or as a Kusto pool in Synapse Analytics or Fabric (in Fabric ADX is branded as real-time analytics).

The book gives a very good introduction to the ADX service (since it was released in 2022 it doesn’t mention Synapse or Fabric though). It gives an overview of the architecture, teaches you how to write basic KQL queries and how to do time-series analysis. Each chapter comes with sample code and queries, and there are a few questions at the end to test your knowledge. There are some additional chapters about monitoring, cost management and performance.

All in all, I was very happy I read this book, since I had little to no knowledge about ADX and I definitely picked up a lot after I finished the book. The only downside is that it is already a bit outdated. Some preview features in the book are now GA (such as the dashboards in ADX Explorer) or the book misses some newer features (like how you can do lightweight ETL with update policies). But, if you want to get a hands-on introduction, I really recommend this book.