Azure Data Catalog - Accessing your Catalog

Microsoft in the News - World Water Day

Did you know that March 22 each year is officially World Water Day?  Who know that we have dedicated a day to the thing that makes up most of our body and is required for life?

Unfortunately, we humans aren’t very good at managing the things that allow us to live on this planet.  In order to help us all out, Microsoft has launched the Water Risk Monetizer (WRM).  This free app is built on the Azure Cloud and is designed to build a business case for taking more action to protect this essential resource.

Many of us pay for our water, but what we pay is only a fraction of the real cost of water.  By undervaluing it, we end up disconnected from the reality of what we are doing when we use, or waste water.

Microsoft is currently using the WRM to prioritize locations and optimize water management systems.  The WRM gives them additional tools that add to design/engineering considerations, and calculate the ROI of different water management strategies.

At the Microsoft data center in San Antonio, Texas, the WRM was used to show that the true cost of water in the Leon Creek Watershed, where the data center is located, was 11 times greater than what the water bill indicated.  Working with an Ecolab partner, Microsoft was able to save more than $140,000 in water costs and reduce their water usage by 58.3 million gallons of potable water per year.

Accessing your Catalog

In my previous blog, we got as far as registering a source of data for your Data Catalog.  The next step is access that data via your Catalog.  From the Registration screen, you can jump directly into the portal by clicking the View Portal button here:

There are more ways to access your catalog, but this is the quickest and easiest when you are already in the Registration screen.

Once you are in your Azure portal you can scroll down to the bottom of your main menu, select More services >   This gives you another menu. At the bottom of that menu part way down the heading of INTELLIGENCE + ANALYTICS is the Data Catalog.  If you choose the star this will place it in your favorites.  

Data Catalog will now show in your main menu at the bottom but you can drag it close to the top if you use it often.

In my Azure portal when I click on my Data Catalog it gives me administrative information about it.  I get the location, resource group, subscription type and if I scroll all the way to the right and click on the …

 it allows me to pin my catalog to my dashboard to make it easy to find.

With my Catalog on my dashboard it looks like this.

Choosing the Data Catalog from my azure dashboard gives  information about your catalog from an administrative point of view and I will get into those details in a later post.  The important thing to note is that the Azure dashboard for the Data Catalog is administrative.  There is no functionality of the Data Catalog in in the Azure dashboard.  There is a quick start button in the dashboard that you can use to view a number of quick start options.

The top option is the Azure Data Catalog Portal.

Once inside the portal you get a data catalog dashboard which we will explore in my next blog.