Understanding Azure Data Solutions

When building solutions, at some point, you need to be able to read and write data.

There are many kinds of data we may need to consider interacting with when designing and building solutions. Pieces of data aren’t just records in a database – images, documents, and even binary files are all data.

In technical terms, all these different types of data can be grouped into structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

Once we have decided what type of data we need to store, we must make choices based on cost, performance, availability, and resilience.

How we plan to use our data can also impact our choice of technology – for example, a web application that simply needs to display images or allow a user to download a document would have very different requirements to a data processing solution that needs to quickly read thousands of small files and output a report.

We must also consider the sensitivity of data...