Azure SQL Data Warehouse Released

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a Microsoft-hosted data warehouse service that uses Azure Storage and SQL Server technologies to deliver petabyte-level data storage and high-speed query features. It could offer lower cost and better scalability and availability than on-premises data warehouse deployments of SQL Server. The service charges separately for storage and computing resources, which allows customers to maintain a data warehouse at a steady rate and scale computing resources as needed to meet demand. However, it lacks some features of the full SQL Server product, and existing data warehouses may require schema changes to take advantage of its scalability and performance.

Service Overview

Data warehouses are a repository for data from one or more data sources and are used to perform business intelligence (BI) tasks such as reporting and data analysis. The data in a data warehouse are typically loaded in big batches on a scheduled basis (such as daily) and are characterized by queries that scan large numbers of rows and columns compared to queries common in transactional workloads. For example, a data warehouse that stores daily sales transactions (millions of rows per month) might be queried on a monthly basis with BI tools to evaluate the effect of price discounts on profit, to help management develop new pricing strategies. Typical on-premises solutions to accumulate such large amounts of data and perform large-scale queries involve substantial costs for high-performance servers and large storage capacity.