During the Ignite Conference, Microsoft released Azure Stream Analytics no-code editor, a drag-and-drop canvas for developing jobs for stream processing scenarios such as streaming ETL, ingestion, and materializing data to data into general availability. The no-code editor is hosted in the company’s big-data streaming platform and event ingestion service, Azure Event Hubs.
Azure Stream Analytics is a managed real-time analytics service. Its no-code editor allows users to develop a Stream Analytics job without writing a single line of code. The company released a public preview earlier this year, and the GA release now includes several new capabilities, such as:
- Support for two new outputs: Event Hubs and Azure Data Explorer.
- Support built-in functions of three categories for data manipulation in the "manage field": date time function, string function, and mathematical function.
- And three new scenario templates under Event Hubs – Process data.
A Stream Analytics job consists of three main components: streaming inputs, transformations, and outputs. The job can have as many components as users require, including multiple inputs, parallel branches with various transformations, and multiple outputs. Users can start creating jobs by opening the Event Hubs instance, selecting Process Data, and picking any available template.
Users can choose an event hub (the first step in a template) as input for a job and start configuring a connection to the hub instance. Subsequently, users must go through additional steps such as groupings, managing fields, and output(s) like Cosmos DB, Event Hub, Synapse, and Azure Data Explorer.
In a blog post from A Cloud Guru, the technical editor’s team explains the benefits of the no-code editor:
This new service essentially gives you a canvas to view all your incoming data streams and then transform them in any way you need before you write it to your destination of choice — all in a no-code way. You get to leverage the deep knowledge that Azure’s data experts have developed over the years and spend your time thinking about the best way to shape your data, instead of getting mired in the syntax of devising your data query and transform operations.
In addition, Clemens Vasters, a principal architect for Messaging and Eventing at Microsoft, tweeted:
Not just a super-slick way to build analytics jobs, but also to project event data into various database stores and data lakes. Built right into the Event Hubs portal experience.
With the no-code editor, Microsoft brings a solution to its customers similar to the recent release of Stream Designer from Confluent, a point-and-click visual builder to simplify data streaming pipelines.
More details on Stream Analytics are available on the document landing page, including tutorials on how to use the no-code editor.
