Data mesh is an exciting new approach to designing and developing data architectures. After my first series of articles and more recent materials on data products and data domains, I received queries on explaining what a practical implementation on Azure could look like. …

Data mesh in practice — All clients I work with are either interested in or planning their next generation of a modern data platform. In this transition, data mesh architecture is gaining a lot of traction. At the same time there are concerns about interpreting this concept: practical guidance is missing. About data mesh Data mesh advocates treating…

Strategic path towards designing an enterprise-scale data mesh — In all data mesh discussions I have with enterprises the subject of data domains draws most attention. Customers find domain-oriented data ownership the hardest part of data mesh. Often, there is a fundamental lack of understanding of Domain-Driven Design (DDD). Other data practitioners find the conceptual notions of DDD too…

Design considerations for building a data mesh architecture — All organizations I work with understand the importance of data and are either interested in or planning their next generation of a modern data platform. Their aim is to move away from tightly coupled data interfaces and varying data flows towards an architecture that allows eco-system connectivity: a cloud distributed…

There’s a lot of fuzz going around the data build tool (DBT). It gains a lot of traction from the data community. I’ve seen several customers and projects, where DBT is already chosen as the tool to be used. But what it is? Where can you position DBT in your…

Many organizations consult me about how I see Microsoft Purview in relation to data mesh or a federated way of working. They ask me about sharing best practices for establishing a domain-oriented architecture. Let’s explorer in this blogpost how Purview can support your data governance ambitions. Introduction Purview is Microsoft’s unified…

One of my customers asked me a question: what is your view on features stores? And how to position them in the data mesh paradigm? My view: I’m no big fan of centralized or shared feature stores. They add unnecessary complexity to your architecture. Each individual analytical use case is…

In the blogpost Modern Data Pipelines, you learned about data pipelines and some of their difficulties. You also read up on an approach by binding Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Purview in order to build a framework for intelligently processing data. In this article I want to take the data…

In a federated architecture, in which responsibilities are distributed between domains, it’s harder to oversee dependencies and obtain insights in data usage. This is where data contracts come into play. Why do data contracts matter? Because they provide insights into who owns what data products. They support setting standards and…