Notes from building data platforms

What we have learned building on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, written down: architecture, migration, governance and analytics. New articles are added regularly.

34 articles

AI-Native Data

Governance by Design: Automatic, Not Manual

Most data governance fails the same way. Not with a dramatic breach, but quietly: standards that were set carefully at the start erode a little each week…

Perspectives

What "Department-Level Output" Actually Means

Claims about artificial intelligence doing the work of hundreds of people have become a genre unto themselves, and most of them deserve the skepticism they…

Perspectives

Why We Walked Away from the Billable-Hour Model

For most of the professional services world, the billable hour is simply how things are done. You have a problem, a firm assigns people to it, and you pay…

Data Engineering

Migrating SSIS to Azure: A Modernization Playbook

SQL Server Integration Services has quietly powered enterprise data movement for the better part of two decades. If your organization has been doing ETL for…

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric Capacity Monitoring: What to Watch

Microsoft Fabric runs on capacity, and capacity is the thing most likely to cause you trouble if you're not watching it. It's a shared, finite resource that…

Healthcare Data

How to Evaluate a Healthcare Data Platform

Choosing a data platform for pharmacy or healthcare operations is not like choosing one for a general business. The data is more sensitive, the regulatory…

Data Engineering

Lakehouse ODS vs. Traditional Data Warehouse

The vocabulary around modern data architecture has gotten crowded. Data warehouse, data lake, lakehouse, operational data store: the terms overlap, get…

AI-Native Data

Agent-Operated Data Infrastructure Explained

There's a meaningful difference between using AI to help build data infrastructure and having AI operate it. The first is a productivity boost for a human…

Microsoft Fabric

What Is a Data Control Plane for Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric consolidated a sprawling analytics stack (data engineering, warehousing, real-time intelligence, and business intelligence) into a single…

AI-Native Data

What Is an AI-Native Data Platform

For twenty years, serious data work meant one thing: hiring people. If you wanted a governed source of truth, a warehouse that stayed current, or dashboards…

Analytics

Unlocking Business Insights with Azure Data Lake

Organizations necessitate comprehensive and scalable solutions to convert this vast data pool into actionable insights that drive informed decision-making.

Cloud

Microsoft Azure vs AWS

Microsoft Azure and AWS offer an extensive range of features and services, making it hard to declare a clear winner.

Cloud

What is Microsoft Azure Data Factory?

Microsoft Azure Data Factory is a powerful cloud-based service that allows organizations to orchestrate and automate the movement and transformation of data.

Cloud

Reasons to Migrate to Microsoft Azure Cloud

There are many compelling reasons to consider migrating your business to Microsoft Azure. As the second largest cloud computing platform in the world (first…

Power BI

Harness the Power of Power BI

Power BI can help your organization make the most of your big data investments by connecting to all your data sources, scaling to analyze, share and promote…

Questions and answers

Short answers to what we hear most often about Dobler Insights.

See all questions

Do we have to replace our current systems?

No. Dobler Insights sits on top of your existing sources on Azure to deliver a governed reporting layer: a single source of truth without ripping out the systems you already run.

How does Dobler Insights give us a single source of truth?

Every metric is defined once and governed centrally on the Microsoft Azure stack, so finance, ops, and sales work from the same numbers instead of reconciling competing reports. Governance is built in, not bolted on.

How fast can we have analytics running?

Weeks, not months. Because Insights is delivered as a product on a proven Azure foundation rather than custom-built from scratch, you reach a governed single source of truth far faster than a traditional BI project.

Tell us what you are building.

A platform to build, a migration to plan, or one of our products to evaluate: it starts with a conversation.