Using Azure Boards

Registering

In order to use Microsoft Azure Storage as a board, you need an Azure Storage account, an Azure Storage container, and an Azure Storage key. You can sign-up and create those from portal.azure.com:

You can then use the Azure Storage conatiner, account, and key to authenticate:

board_register_azure(container = "pinscontainer",
                     account = "pinsstorage",
                     key = "ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCAB==")

Notice that board_register_azure() is just an alias with named parameters to board_register(); the previous code is equivalent to:

board_register("azure", container = "pinscontainer",
                        account = "pinsstorage",
                        key = "ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABCAB==")

Once the board is registered, you can pin and search using pin(), pin_get() and pin_find().

Pinning

Like in other boards, you can create pins for iris and mtcars by setting board to Azure’s board name,

pin(iris, description = "The iris data set", board = "azure")
pin(mtcars, description = "The motor trend cars data set", board = "azure")

After a pin is created, the pin also becomes available in the Azure’s dataset website; by default, they are created as private datasets.

You can also retrieve pins back from this repo using the now familiar pin_get() function.

pin_get("iris", board = "azure")

# A tibble: 150 x 5
   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
          <dbl>       <dbl>        <dbl>       <dbl> <fct>  
 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2 setosa 
 2          4.9         3            1.4         0.2 setosa 
 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2 setosa 
 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2 setosa 
 5          5           3.6          1.4         0.2 setosa 
 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4 setosa 
 7          4.6         3.4          1.4         0.3 setosa 
 8          5           3.4          1.5         0.2 setosa 
 9          4.4         2.9          1.4         0.2 setosa 
10          4.9         3.1          1.5         0.1 setosa 
# … with 140 more rows

Discovering

You can then search pins in your Azure board using pin_find(), which by default search all boards but you can also explicitly request to use this particular board:

pin_find("data", board = "azure")

# A tibble: 2 x 4
  name   description                   type  board
  <chr>  <chr>                         <chr> <chr>
1 iris   The iris data set             table azure
2 mtcars The motor trend cars data set table azure

Notice that the given ‘data’ search keyword is searched in the name and description fields for the pins available in this repo.