Hoping to learn how companies put growth mindset to use in a rapidly evolving tech-intense environment, Microsoft has been interviewing Microsoft partners across the Netherlands for the last months. Their goal is to understand what having a growth mindset means, whether companies can profit from it, or if it is just another trendy psychological concept?!
Interview with Danny Kruge, Mission Critical Engineer at Schuberg Philis.
Microsofts guest for the first interview is Danny Kruge, Mission Critical Engineer at Schuberg Philis. Last year, when one of his projects moved to Azure, Danny had only known Azure by its name.
"I was nervous being surrounded by smart people. I was quiet in the project calls and thought the loudest most spoken person knows best, but I never suggested my thoughts", Danny recalled.
Initially, the project was moved to a SharePoint online, and a report was hosted in Power BI online instead of on-prem. The architecture was designed to use Power BI Data gateway to be hosted on-prem and retrieve the data. The complications of this design became apparent when the select SQL queries were blocking ETL processes on the on-prem SQL Data warehouse. The query ran for 18 hours.
Strive for Progress
Schuberg Philis took over the architecture design and inputted the data into Azure SQL. With the help of the Data Migration Assistant, Danny and his team were able to reduce the query time to 3 hours.
Following this, He continued to investigate Synapse and Data factories. After joining a 4-day Synapse Analytics course, he used Synapse as a starting block and introduced him to more tools within Azure. In his words, "Synapse allowed me to explore pipelines and start understanding the components in place and how data could be moved."
This gave the light bulb moment for the project, and the team successfully built a Storage account, Data Factory, and Azure SQL Server. With this in place, the data could be uploaded within 20 minutes, which was a tremendous performance difference. Currently, the team has completed a proof of value for the customer to move their existing data warehouse to Synapse.
Not stopping there, Danny continued to gain further knowledge and cut the time down to 12 minutes upload time (from said 18 hours). This also led to helping improve a 3rd-party input as the report generation took a further 9-12 hours from Azure SQL. Working hand in hand with them, Danny has improved that to 2 hours run time so the customer can have the piece ready in the morning each day.