Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a cloud-based data warehouse-as-a-service hosted within Microsoft’s Azure platform. It has a massively parallel processing (MPP) shared nothing architecture capable of distributing query computation over a set of compute nodes running Azure SQL Database and uses Azure Storage Blobs as the underlying data storage.^[1] It is designed to handle computational and data intensive queries on datasets exceeding 1TB. This technology is based on Microsoft’s on premise data warehousing product, Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW), which runs on the Analytics Platform System (APS). This PaaS also features PolyBase ^[2] which allows queries to span across both structured and unstructured analytical workloads using Transact-SQL(TSQL). PolyBase^[3] is also the optimal method to load data into SQL Data Warehouse^[4] as it does so in parallel across the compute nodes.^[5]

Azure SQL Data Warehouse decouples compute and storage enabling compute power to be adjusted independently of storage based on workload requirements any given time.^[6] All data is written geo-redundantly across regions for high availability and disaster recovery. Scaling computation does not require reorganization of the underlying data which allows this operation to take only the time needed to allocate new compute nodes. This data warehousing service also includes the ability to pause a data warehouse instance which also pauses the billing of the compute nodes.

Data Tools

SQL Data Warehouse integrates with data tools such as Azure Machine Learning^[7] for advanced analytics, Azure Data Factory for data orchestration, Azure Stream Analytics for real-time analytics, and Power BI^[8] for data visualization. Standard query tools like SQL Management Studio (SSMS), SQLCMD, and SQL Server Data Tools can also be used to execute queries.

History

SQL Data Warehouse is currently generally available as of July 12, 2016. It was in limited public preview on June 25, 2015^[9]

References

1. "What is Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Microsoft Azure". azure.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
2. "PolyBase". msdn.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2015-12-10.
3. DeWitt, David J.; Halverson, Alan; Nehme, Rimma; Shankar, Srinath; Aguilar-Saborit, Josep; Avanes, Artin; Flasza, Miro; Gramling, Jim. "Split query processing in polybase". Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Management of data - SIGMOD '13. doi:10.1145/2463676.2463709.
4. "Loading data with PolyBase in Azure SQL Data Warehouse (Channel 9)". Channel 9. Retrieved 2015-12-11.
5. "Load data into SQL Data Warehouse | Microsoft Azure". azure.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2015-12-11.
6. "Cloud Data Warehousing Just Got Easier with Azure SQL Data Warehouse". www.blue-granite.com. Retrieved 2015-12-15.
7. "Using Azure Machine Learning with SQL Data Warehouse | Microsoft Azure Blog". azure.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
8. "Using Power BI with SQL Data Warehouse | Microsoft Azure Blog". azure.microsoft.com. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
9. "Azure SQL Data Warehouse Leads New Microsoft Data Products -- Visual Studio Magazine". visualstudiomagazine.com. Retrieved 2015-12-15.