ACE

• It's virtual and you can access it remotely
• Others can connect to it, too
• Secured

If you don’t already have an account, please contact your team lead or manager to request one. They can contact IDOHODADataEngineers@health.in.gov or Tyler Wong (twong@resultant.com).

Please contact your team lead or manager to request access to a project.​ An ACE administrator can assign you to a specific project that you are approved to access. They can also create new projects if required.

IDOH requires a project charter to create a project in ACE, and the charter should specify the datasets and their allowable uses. If you want to add data or use it in a way that is outside the charter (within reason), then the project charter should be amended, or a new charter and new ACE project should be created.

Most ACE users will have access to one project at a time and will need to switch projects to get data from different projects (e.g. Vital Records and NBS). This is necessary to help keep data compartmentalized and more secure. IDOH leadership (Bob Davis and Peter Krombach) may approve multiple-project-at-once access for some users, depending on their role and applicable IDOH policy.

It is technically possible to access data in shared drives from ACE, but to prevent data leakage it is discouraged by IDOH policy. Please ask your manager if you have questions.

Peter Krombach and others are currently discussing the long-term plan and will provide guidance later. The ODA Data Engineering team will probably help move data from some shared drives into ACE project shares in 2024 Q2. In the meantime, refer to the FAQ above.

Refer to the Tools and Utilities section in the ACE wiki. Developers (data engineers) may have access to additional tools within the Azure Portal using their elevated/Peoplesoft ID to login.

The request process is initiated by opening a ticket in DevOps. Refer to the VDI Software Requests page in the ACE wiki for more info. For additional support, contact IDOHODADataEngineers@health.in.gov.

Synapse is a secure database containing prepared IDOH data that can be used for analysis. You can connect to it from your ACE virtual desktop and create SQL queries to get data from schemas to which you have been granted access. Refer to the Synapse Data Warehouse section of the ACE wiki for more information.

The primary tools used by ODA data engineers to automate jobs are Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Azure Logic Apps. Databricks does have some job scheduling capabilities, but it is
recommended to schedule Databricks notebooks via ADF instead. It is not possible to schedule jobs that run directly on your virtual desktop or in Jupyterhub, because they are not running 24/7 and there isn't a mechanism to start them automatically as part of a pipeline.

Thanks to the scalable nature of the cloud, it’s possible to seamlessly change the size of your virtual desktop. If approved, an administrator can give you more processing power or memory.