{"id":13641,"date":"2015-06-24T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-24T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2024-01-22T22:50:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T06:50:13","slug":"azure-sql-data-warehouse-opens-for-limited-public-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/sql-server\/blog\/2015\/06\/24\/azure-sql-data-warehouse-opens-for-limited-public-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Azure SQL Data Warehouse opens for Limited Public Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director, Data Platform<\/em><\/p>\n At the Build conference in April, we announced Azure SQL Data Warehouse, our new enterprise-class elastic data warehouse-as-a-service. Today, we\u2019re pleased to announce that Azure SQL Data Warehouse is open for Limited Public Preview.<\/p>\n With growing data volumes, you have been telling us that you want to take advantage of the cost-efficiencies, elasticity and hyper-scale of cloud for your large data warehouses. You also need for that data warehouse to work with your existing infrastructure and tools, utilize your current skills and integrate with many sources of data. With Azure SQL Data Warehouse, we deliver:<\/p>\n Azure SQL Data Warehouse is based on SQL Server\u2019s massively parallel processing architecture currently available only in the Analytics Platform System (APS), and integrates with existing data tools including Power BI for data visualization, Azure Machine Learning for advanced analytics, Azure Data Factory for event processing and Azure HDInsight, Microsoft\u2019s 100% Apache Hadoop managed big data service.<\/p>\n First enterprise-class elastic cloud data warehouse<\/b><\/p>\n This is the first elastic cloud data warehouse to offer enterprise class features our customers and partners expect and need like full indexing, stored procedure\/functions, partitions, and columnar indexing. Without these features, organizations have to rewrite their existing applications and workflows at significant cost and slower time to market. This is the first fully managed cloud data warehouse to offer the compatibility SQL users need to migrate to the cloud.\u00a0 Azure SQL Data Warehouse will be supported by a rich ecosystem of partners that support SQL Server today. Find out more about the partners we are working with from Garth Fort, GM of the enterprise partner group at Microsoft here<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, because Azure SQL Data Warehouse independently scales compute and storage, users only pay for query performance as they need it.\u00a0 Unlike other cloud data warehouses that require hours or days to resize, the service allows customers to grow or shrink query power in seconds.\u00a0As you can scale compute costs separately from storage costs, costs are easier to forecast than competitive offerings.<\/p>\n Pause compute for lower costs <\/b><\/p>\n Elastic pause enables a customer to shut down the compute infrastructure while persisting the data and only paying for data storage. Customers can schedule pausing compute usage either through Azure SQL Data Warehouse or Azure Scheduler to optimize the cost of the service.<\/p>\n Leveraging existing SQL server skills with Hadoop<\/b><\/p>\n With the incredible growth of all types of data, the need to combine structured and unstructured data is essential. With Polybase, we offer the ability to combine data sets easily. SQL Data Warehouse can query semi-structured data stored in blob storage using familiar T-SQL, making it easy to gain insights from various data types.<\/p>\n Hybrid data warehouse \u2013 your data, your platform, your choice<\/b><\/p>\n Deploying on-premises data warehouse solutions can range from weeks to months. Azure SQL Data Warehouse takes seconds to provision. Cloud born data is more readily ingested into Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Other technologies such as Azure Data Factory and Power BI, which is available as a Connector to Azure SQL Data Warehouse today, provide the data management gateway which makes bringing data from on-premises sources to the cloud much simpler.\u00a0 Azure SQL Data Warehouse also uses the same management as APS appliance to make hybrid management easier.<\/p>\n\n