To get the most out of this book

While having read the original data mesh materials by Zhamak Dehghani would definitely be an advantage, it’s not a must. This book provides documentation references for all the Microsoft Azure services mentioned, but some working knowledge of Microsoft Azure will help you save time reading the docs.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Microsoft Azure Azure SQL Database Azure Synapse Azure Data Lake Gen2 Microsoft Purview Microsoft Active Directory Azure Resource Manager Azure Log Analytics Workspace Azure Data Explorer	NA
Great Expectations	Windows or Linux with Python 3.8 to 3.11
Profisee	Deployed using Azure Marketplace
PowerShell, Azure Command Line Interface	Windows
Python 3.8 to 3.11	Windows 11 or Ubuntu 22.04
SQL Server Management Studio	Windows 10 or Windows 11

For installation and setup of the preceding tools and platforms, please see the following references:

• Installing PowerShell: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell?view=powershell-7.4
• Installing Azure Command Line Interface: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cl
• Installing SQL Server Management Studio: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-ver16
• Setting up SQL Server Management Studio to query Azure SQL Database: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/connect-query-ssms?view=azuresql
• Installing Python: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3110/
• Profisee SaaS Enterprise Data Management: "https://profisee.com/#

Note that the format of Chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17 is different from those of the previous chapters. That is because these chapters are architectural references. The aim of these chapters is to provide guidance on how to set up analytics for a given workload. You might also observe portions of text being repeated across those chapters. This is also by design. At a later point, you might want to refer to a specific reference chapter directly. In order to make sure you have everything you need in those four chapters, we repeat some of the text in them. Each reference chapter is designed to be a quick read and lets you explore all the components of the architecture using the reference links provided.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself. Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.