Azure SQL Data Warehouse Update and Roadmap 2018

• Azure SQL Data Warehouse will interest companies whose data warehouses have variable usage and companies with limited capital and expertise to maintain data warehouses on-premises.
• Recent changes improve large-scale compute performance, enhance compatibility with SQL Server to ease migration, and enhance control over critical and sensitive data.
• Once a data warehouse is stored in the service, it will be expensive to leave, so customers should adopt the service only if they are willing to trust Microsoft with their data warehouses for an extended period.

Azure SQL Data Warehouse hosts data warehouses, large databases of data collected from an organization’s systems to use for future analysis and decision making. For example, a global retailer might have a data warehouse that stores past sales data that is used for business performance evaluation and demand forecasting. SQL Data Warehouse supports databases with sizes in the petabytes and uses specialized technologies to deliver high-speed queries of large data sets. The service is compatible with SQL Server, which allows customers to leverage existing skill sets. (See the sidebar “Azure SQL Data Warehouse Overview“.)