{"id":13348,"date":"2022-06-06T11:27:41","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T18:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/?p=13348"},"modified":"2025-06-13T17:32:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T00:32:06","slug":"external-analytics-collections-with-azure-blob-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.couchbase.com\/blog\/external-analytics-collections-with-azure-blob-storage\/","title":{"rendered":"Derive Insights From Azure Blob Storage Using External Analytics Collections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following the support for Analytics <\/span>external collections for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3)<\/span><\/a> in the <\/span>Couchbase Server 6.6 release<\/span><\/a>, Couchbase is excited to announce the forthcoming support and general availability for <\/span>Azure Blob Storage for external Analytics collections<\/b>. This will further enable customers to combine data from external sources (e.g., AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage) with local data (Analytics Collections) as well as remote Couchbase data (<\/span>Remote Analytics Collections<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Customer use case<\/span><\/h2>\n

Some customers use Azure Blob Storage to reduce storage costs and store large volumes of data (e.g., multiple years of historical data, offline business data for machine learning, product reviews, etc.). They have expressed a desire to combine, query, and utilize Azure Blob Storage data in real time to make this data available to business users for data analytics. Read here for more about other Analytics use cases<\/a><\/span>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How do external Analytics collections work?<\/span><\/h2>\n

This section was previously covered in <\/span>AWS S3 Analytics external datasets blog<\/span><\/a>. If you have used external Analytics collections using S3 before, this part will already be familiar to you.<\/span><\/p>\n

External Analytics collections provide the ability to dynamically query and analyze data residing in external sources (e.g., AWS S3 and Azure Blob Storage), allowing users to easily combine data in real time from both inside and outside of their Couchbase Analytics nodes. This is achieved in three simple steps:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
      \n
    1. Set up an external link using a <\/span>REST API call<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>command-line interface (CLI)<\/span><\/a>, or <\/span>Couchbase Server Workbench<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/li>\n
    2. Create an external Analytics collection on the external link.<\/span><\/li>\n
    3. Query the Analytics collection using <\/span>SQL++ for Analytics<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(or use <\/span>Tableau with Couchbase Analytics Tableau connector<\/span><\/a>).<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Let\u2019s walk through a simple example. iMaz, an e-commerce company, sells consumer products online. Their order, product, and user data are stored on a Couchbase cluster with both Data and Analytics services (on separate sets of nodes in the cluster). They use the Analytics Service to run ad hoc and complex queries to analyze their business. iMaz also stores their product reviews on Azure Blob Storage, and they would like to combine and analyze the top 3 most highly rated products using the Couchbase Analytics Service.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Sample product data:<\/span><\/p>\n

      [{\r\n  \"id\": \"Product_1\",\r\n  \"docType\": \"Product\",\r\n  \"productId\": 1,\r\n  \"price\": 811.76,\r\n  \"salePrice\": 70.14,\r\n  \"productName\": \"Ergonomic Cotton Ball\",\r\n  \"desc\": \"Plastic fused metallic Ergonomic Cotton Ball\"\r\n}]\r\n<\/pre>\n
      Sample review data:<\/p>\n
      {\r\n  \"id\": \"Review_0001764a17a844279a2227e137cc4e36\",\r\n  \"docType\": \"Review\",\r\n  \"reviewId\": \"0001764a17a844279a2227e137cc4e36\",\r\n  \"productId\": 1,\r\n  \"userId\": 5862,\r\n  \"reviewerName\": \"M. Schaefer\",\r\n  \"reviewerEmail\": \"...@mmail.com\",\r\n  \"rating\": 5,\r\n  \"title\": \"Works well and meets expectations.\",\r\n  \"review\": \"Product works great and will buy one more for my extended family.\",\r\n  \"reviewDate\": 1597273484\r\n}<\/pre>\n
      Let\u2019s walk through each of the three steps from above with sample setup code along with a <\/span>SQL++<\/span><\/a> query. Here is a demo video for you as well:<\/span><\/p>\n