Delving into modern data services and practices

As stated in the previous section, you should not rush to newer technologies for the sake of it. However, the good news is that most of these technologies are available at an affordable price, so you should at least explore them. Although we try to set services under a certain category, some of them span multiple categories. So, you shouldn't consider their positions on the map to be official or the only way to organize them. For example, Azure Storage spans at least the modern and big data categories. Figure 6.6 shows Azure's vast modern data landscape, which we will review in the upcoming subsections:

Figure 6.6 – The modern data landscape in Azure

Let's now explore the ELT category, which is the modern counterpart of ETL.

Introducing the ELT practice

ELT is quite similar to ETL, with one notable exception: the transformation step. As we saw earlier, in ETL, every step is entirely...