Microsoft expands Azure Data offering with extended SQL Database capabilities, Data Warehousing & Data Lakes

Today Microsoft announced additional features for Azure SQL Database and two new big data services called Azure Data Lake & Azure SQL Data Warehouse at //BUILD/.

Extending the Azure SQL Database capabilities

Scott Guthrie announced new capabilites for Azure SQL Database going from full text search to creating elastic database pools to encrypting connections with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) which presumeably uses Azure Key Vault behind the scenes.

Learn more about the extended capabilities here :

• Build 2015 : Elastic Database Tools (Video)
• Microsoft Announces Elastic SQL Database Pools For Azure (Article)

SQL Data Warehouse

SQL Data Warehouse allows you to store petabytes of relational data in one place and integrates Machine Learning & Power BI.

While Azure SQL Data Warehouse is released two years after AWS’ Redshift Scott compared both services and showed that SQL Data Warehouse now is a leap ahead offering the solution on-prem, is more flexible and comes with full SQL support.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse will become available as public preview in June.

Azure Data Lake

Last but not least is Azure Data Lake, which is in private preview, that allows you to store & manage infinite amount of data and keep it in their original format. This allows you to store your valuable data for ages without losing important segments of it.

Data Lake will be a central storage to perform low latency analytics jobs with enterprise-grade security and integration with other services like Azure Stream Analytics. It is compatible with Hadoops HDFS and Microsofts HDInsights as well as the open-source tooling like Spark & Storm.

Learn more about Azure SQL Data Warehouse & Azure Data Lake here :

• Microsoft announces Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Data Lake in preview (Article)

• Microsoft BUILDs its cloud Big Data story (Article)

• Introduction to the Data Lake-concept (Article)

Current IoT offering in Microsoft Azure

Let’s wrap up the day with an nice overview of the current Azure offering in the IoT space.

Let’s hope that tomorrows keynote will unveil what the famous Azure IoT Suite includes and what tricks Microsoft has up their sleeves.
In the meanwhile have a look at the IoT breakout sessions today :

• Internet of Things overview (link)
• Azure IoT Security (link)
• Best practices for creating IoT solutions with Azure (link)

All images in this blog posts are property of The Verge & Venturebeat.

Thanks for reading,

Tom.