Azure SQL Data Warehouse as a Service

Azure SQL Data Warehouse (in preview) will be a scalable, high-performance intelligence (BI) data-repository as a service based on SQL Server. The service could be a viable alternative to on-premises data warehouse deployments, especially for organizations that want to test large data analysis without making a substantial hardware investment. The billing model charges for computing resources independently from storage costs, allowing customers to scale computing resources to meet query performance and cost constraints. However, SQL Data Warehouse lacks some features of a full on-premises SQL Server based data warehouse, and the multitenant nature of the service may not be suitable for some applications.

Hosted SQL Server Data Warehouse

Data warehouses are a repository for data from one or more data sources and are used to perform BI tasks such as reporting and data analysis. The data in a data warehouse are typically loaded in large 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 both high-performance servers and large storage capacity.