This video is for your data that is too big for an excel spreadsheet and too small for a data warehouse. I like to refer to this as “Medium Data”.
I can think of many times I needed this during my career. Typically, the “medium data” scenarios were related to snapshotting historical data weekly and showing changes in trends over time. One good trick I learned in one of my first jobs was to snapshot my CRM order book every week and save it in a CSV format. Eventually, that got too large for my meager tools, and I started aggregating, losing data, or other hacks (i.e., multiple excel files). Linking excel files together was basically enough to motivate me to learn SQL. With Azure, you can easily scale into the next size of data and keep your analytics rolling. Check the video below for a 15 min walk through.
I’ve just shown the basics – but there are some awesome articles out there that can go more in-depth, including some great automation.
The core tutorial in this video can be found here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/52061.t-sql-bulk-insert-azure-csv-blob-into-azure-sql-database.aspx
To really amp it up with automatic import, check out this: https://marczak.io/posts/azure-loading-csv-to-sql/